A Hero's Mask
by Lang Noi
Summary: WIP. Everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes, though, there are people conspiring on your side. A badly-confused and desperate Alex Mercer makes a deal with the darkness. Part 9 up. Read and review, please.
1. Deal With The Devil

****

Chapter One: Deal With The Devil

**A/N:** This will, in all likelihood, update faster than the other stories I'm working on. Why?_ [PROTOTYPE] _is a short game, and I can work on this at school.

**Borderline-telepathy is in bold.**

Everything else is in varying levels of italics.

* * *

_My name is Alex Mercer. They call me a killer. A monster. A terrorist. I'm all of these things._

_But I'm also a brother. A friend. A comrade. A hero. _

_This is my story._

* * *

In the gloom below a burnt-out streetlight, a black shape picked its way through the rubble. It was of indeterminate size—its glowing yellow eyes seemed to bob up and down independent of its actual movement. Nonetheless, there was a clear impression of sharpness and spines—if you listened, you could almost hear bones snapping and flesh tearing under the strength of unseen jaws.

At about this time, a high-caliber bullet ripped through the shadows and the soldier heard something yowl. He laughed as the shot continued to echo through the deserted streets.

It should be said that this was a stupid thing to do. If the BlackWatch trooper had stopped to confer with his squadmates, he would have been informed of the mild-to-severe infestation of weird black monstrosities that didn't respond well to being shot at. Or he could have just turned around and noticed that the number of eye-reflections had gone from two to thirty.

But he didn't turn around, and he never got a chance to regret it. The pack of shadow-hounds swarmed all around, then leapt. They devoured him in seconds. Then they went back to feasting on the dozens of bullet-riddled bodies the BlackWatch patrol had left behind. They were the only scavengers who could eat Infected corpses freely, without even attracting the attention of the wandered hordes all around.

For the hyenas of a plague-infested Manhattan, life was good.

* * *

**Two weeks ago…**

* * *

It was either hideously early in the morning or unusually late at night when the GENTEK building experienced its third security breach in as many days. Like the last three, practically no one outside of the chain of command knew a thing before the excrement hit the rotating oscillator.

Near the building's outermost wall, a pack of shadow-hounds slunk around the confines of an empty road, hungry but unsure of where to go with so many terrible lights everywhere. They hated the lights of the city with a passion, especially the way it burned their sensitive hides. But there was no _food_…

What qualified as food for a shadow-hound was, essentially, anything they could corner in absolute darkness. Usually they ate things like rats, stray animals, and hobos, but there had been nothing out on the streets since the plague had hit only a few days ago. The rats had fled, the strays had died, and the hobos were inside buildings somewhere. That left them with nothing but trash when they craved live meat, and it drove them to desperation.

One of them, not particularly smart even among their kind, scrambled up the surface of a concrete wall to look over it, and it didn't mind the fact that razor wire seemed to be neatly severing its "skull." It managed to see a few things that it didn't immediately brush off as food/threat/thing. It saw a building—the GENTEK building, you idiot—and several humans.

Men in green? They were…they were pathologists. Disease-workers. Plague-finders. They seemed to be waiting for something, waving their arms. The sound of rotor blades filled the air. The shadow-hound turned its head up and spotted a helicopter descending from the night sky. Then it looked back at the courtyard below.

As it watched, a man stumbled from the building's front door, taking refuge briefly behind a delivery truck. The shadow-hound perked up—there was the scent of blood, but the injured one was still wandering around. _Food_. Its potential prey seemed more focused on the helicopter, though, so it looked over there, too.

The shadow-hound felt a strong rebuke from the other end of its collective intelligence. Its mistress was not happy with it, not at all. It cowered, pressing its head literally flat against the concrete.

**Shut up. I don't want you going around eating humans again. You and yours cause enough trouble just existing. Now…**_**let me see**_**.**

There were men dressed all in black—BlackWatch soldiers—standing in front of the helicopter now, arguing the pathologists.

Its mind was overridden as its mistress asserted her will. The combined being watched with interest as the BlackWatch soldiers gunned down the entire morgue staff and the man—black leather jacket, gray hood, jeans, decent shoes—tried to sneak past them shortly afterward. He didn't get far.

**Well, **_**duh**_, it/she thought. **What does he expect to do? BlackWatch is **_**smart**_**, or at least not as stupid as the generic guarding-types should be. He's fucked. I really wish it wasn't this way…**

"On alert—priority target!" Wait, _priority_? As in the umpteenth victim of the day is actually someone they've been _assigned_ to kill? _Hold on just one second—_!

"Wait!" The shadow hound couldn't tell if the man was actually yelling anything, or if its mistress had planted the thought in its mind.

"Take him down!" They opened fire and the man's blood was splattered across the wall behind him as well as all across the concrete and he fell to his hands and knees.

"Hmurn…" the shadow-hound's mouth tried to say. No good. It couldn't form the words its mistress wanted. Its mouth was the wrong shape. What she _wanted_ to do was call out a warning, because chances were that _anything_ that did not flop to the ground dead after fifty rounds was not normal. But considering neither she nor her legions liked BlackWatch to any real degree, she wasn't sure who to root for in any case.

"…_What's happening to me_?" It/she heard the man half-scream, half-groan. Then he jerked his head to the left and, even though the soldiers hardly slowed their rate of fire even for a moment, He broke into a sudden, scrambling run. He leapt on top of a dumpster and jumped from there while the shadow-hound stared—_**the wall's twenty feet high!**_—and its head exploded as the man fell through where it had been.

Just as, several dozen blocks away and several tunnel systems below, the shadow-queen swore, the remaining members of the pack fanned out around the man, uttering almost subsonic growls. He didn't seem to notice them, not with the way he was breathing so hard that everything else was practically silence in comparison.

One of the pack members looked up as the helicopter's rotors became loud again. It backed away from the man to approach the wall in curiosity, and was the only one of its group to escape being vaporized by harsh white searchlights. Badly burned, it flattened itself against the wall, yowling, and could only watch as the man took off at something approaching a dead run, if stumbling every few seconds didn't count against him.

While the helicopter's spotlight was still trained on the street, it couldn't move. The shadow-hound felt its mistress speak. **Wait. Stop. Track him.**

**Pack?** it asked.

**Yes, pack is here with me. Pack is waiting.**

The lone shadow-hound whined. **Pack not **_**here**_**.**

It felt its mistress groan. **Pack will come. **_**Follow him**_**.**

This time, it didn't argue. As the spotlight moved away and the human leapt the fence at the end of the road, the shadow-hound gathered up its remaining strength and followed.

**Good boy.**

* * *

**That was interesting. I wonder what went wrong in the GENTEK building.**

Deep in the near-abandoned (since most people were rather edgy of a place associated with violent death as had occurred only a few days ago) subway tunnels of Manhattan, something huge stirred. Since the Penn Station incident less than three days ago, most people around the city had gone home ill. No one used the trains anymore, so that left the tunnels to whomever or whatever would claim them.

In the gloom, the shadows gained strength.

If someone had managed to accidentally wander this far into the tunnels with a flashlight or something similar, they would have been they would have been able to get a sense of slithering blackness all around them. Silent, sentient, and very, very patient. There would have been flashes of blue-black and deep purple as the light shifted, and occasional flickers of brilliant blood red, all seeming to just barely skitter out of the pool of light.

Then there would have been the eyes. Hundreds of glittering yellow eyes, reflecting the dim light, and one pair of pale blue, diamond-shaped eyes rising above the writhing horde, above a wicked white-fanged grin.

But no one had come down in a long time, so the conversation was conducted in total darkness and near-silence.

**Ed, what do you think?** the shadow-queen asked. **It's only been a few days since the shooting at Penn Station and the sudden-onset 1918 flu season.**

The creature designated "Ed" made a noise that was a cross between a trill, a coo, and a gurgle. Its head bobbed and its crooked antennae twitched as it made another, similar noise a moment later. But its mistress was no longer paying attention.

**Who **_**was**_** killed at Penn Station?** She was interrogating the collective memory of her thousands of minions by the time realization dawned on Ed. Images returned, fragmented by her followers' poor senses and intelligence, but functional. Black leather jacket. Gray hood. Denim. Glass. _Blood_.

Shots fired, shots fired…

**He **_**died**_** there? But the omega of pack Three-Sixteen just saw him survive thirty gunshots!** Something had clearly changed, and she, for one, was excited by the prospect. The idea of another possible superpowered being intrigued her far more than the recent disaster. She was suddenly intensely glad she had put the last shadow-hound, the beta of the destroyed pack, on the case. She would have her answers shortly.

**Find out who he was,** she told Ed sharply. **Take** **as many hounds and bats as you need.**

Ed bobbed his oversized head and melted into the darkness of the tunnel. She felt the old pack of the lone shadow-hound—now regenerated and back in top form—follow him. Her legions could never truly be killed, only temporarily destroyed and forced to return to her body, where all of them had been derived from. They would succeed.

**GENTEK…GENTEK…what do we know about them?**

She thought about his for some time, until her mental connection to the lone shadow-hound cut off with a snapping sensation. It had been destroyed.

As its body and mind were assimilated into her own, she caught fleeting impressions of light and sound and pain. And blood. Lots of blood.

The last tendril of the hound's independent life snaked downward into her dwelling from the surface, and then stayed taut like a fishing line. She tracked its length to an alley both high above her head and some distance across the island.

Whoever had killed her pet was still there and, curious, the shadow-queen followed the thread.

* * *

Several minutes earlier, the lone shadow-hound had been following the weakened human by slinking along the edges of bright lights and the shadows of anything it could find. This had involved ducking under cars as the man had leapt over them, crawling up the sides of buildings when the man decided to play merry-hell with the helicopters following him around, and finally dodging between the press of bodies as its target started to slow down.

With its rudimentary thought processes freed from its mistress's, it didn't recognize that the steady drip-drip of blood indicated that the man was dying. However, it did notice that something was off about the flesh-and-blood creature. He didn't smell human.

The man stumbled off into an alleyway, a shadow-hound's favorite lurking area. There was no other pack here, though, so there were no extra eyes or mouths.

The shadow-hound hid in the gloom behind a pile of trash and waited, watching as the man finally stopped stumbling and sank against a wall. He didn't move and still it watched with a mind like a camera, even noting clinically that there were indeed at least a dozen bleeding wounds in his chest.

The shadow-hound turned its head slightly at the sound of footsteps. Despite the fact that it didn't have any ears or even much in the way of a well-defined head, besides the jaws and eyes, it could hear the soldier's breathing as well. Must have been the gas mask.

It gave a subsonic growl. Even if this particular shadow-hound had never encountered a BlackWatch trooper personally, its link to other members of its kind was feeding information to it. BlackWatch operatives were Not Good.

It recognized the slow approach the soldier made. Fear. Caution. It recognized the weapon, too, but only as a gun. Humans pointed it and death came out. The barrel was pointed at the mad who now was leaning heavily against the brick wall, unresponsive. "Hostile sighted. Contact imminent."

Here the hound faced a dilemma. Its orders were to track. What was it supposed to do when its quarry was going to be killed by something else? The answer came quickly.

Tolerate no rivals. The shadow-hound surged into motion just as the BlackWatch soldier began to speak. It rushed in between the soldier and the fallen man in a black wave and, turning instantly, leapt.

The soldier fired and the shadow-hound's head exploded.

* * *

"What the fuck was that?" demanded the BlackWatch soldier after the beast's body began to drain away into the ground. It wasn't—it hadn't—what kind of—what the fuck?

"That's the million-dollar question, isn't it?" said a voice behind him. He turned and fired immediately at the sound, but there was no one there. Even the street beyond seemed deserted.

"Creepy, huh? You should probably see the shrink after this. Assuming you live that long." There it was again. It sounded female—low and taunting, though, and with an edge of malice.

"Fuck this," he growled. He turned and very deliberately put a round into his original target's forehead. The body jerked and slumped, blood splattering the brick behind it. Turning back around in search of the voice from before, he pulled out his radio and started to contact the rest of his squad. "Tango down. Terminated."

He didn't see his target stand up. He didn't even know that the last round had been far from fatal until he was grabbed from behind. He had about enough to yell in sudden panic, and he wasn't aware of much after that. This was because his head was near-instantly smashed against the pavement and his neck snapped.

The shadow-queen watched with interest as tentacles sprouted from the hooded man's back and the BlackWatch operative was—for lack of any better word—dragged inside. It reminded her of an extremely morbid and rather grotesque plant of some sort. **Or an octopus.**

With her body melded to the wall's shadows and the glow from her eyes extinguished, she was practically invisible even when she allowed her head to materialize some twenty feet off the ground. If the hooded man decided to look directly up at that moment, he would have seen here, but he didn't. Too bad.

It had been almost fun to non-lethally delay the trooper. She hadn't expected the tentacles, though. **My, my, my, what interesting toys GENTEK has developed. A new super-soldier program, then? Except…no, that doesn't quite fit. If it's that, why doesn't this monster have a uniform?**

**I'll just have to observe. Undoubtedly I'm not the only one interested.**

Just then, she found that Ed was trying to contact her, clawing at one edge of her senses like an annoying Chihuahua at a bedroom door. As the only truly independent shadow-creature she had, she trusted his judgment more than that of the others. He seemed to be in the GENTEK building's morgue, if the blast of cold and stark lighting were any hint. The room seemed empty.

**Did you find anything?**

He had. A clipboard, flung halfway across the room, resting in the shadows with papers everywhere. His little clawed hands settled on one.

**Mercer, Alexander J. Next-of-kin: Mercer, Dana A.**, she read. Then Ed seemed to lose interest and crawl off. **Damn it, Ed, you're supposed to be the smart one!** She tried to ask him where Dana lived, but it was no use. He couldn't read and had apparently decided to go rogue for a while.

**Well, I'll just have to follow him. Ed, come home. I need you for something more interesting.**

Ed sent a vaguely questioning thought back.

**The others…have them look in on BlackWatch headquarters. Spy on them. I think they need to be reined in a bit, don't you?**

* * *

Following Mercer was easy enough. He didn't make much of an effort to be stealthy, for one thing. With Ed slinking along after him from less than ten feet away and a pack of shadow-hounds trailing still further behind, it would be impossible to lose him. **Probably**.

He was fast, though, she'd give him that. Far faster than any man had a right to be on foot. **It's kind of funny, really. Here I am, commanding my legions to trail him like a pack of enamored fans and I haven't a damn clue what for. Hooray. It just proves that I'm stupid.**

**Ed, hide yourself in his shadow. He'll get in an elevator eventually, if he doesn't just scale the damn walls like some **_**other**_** mutant I could mention, and I'll need you to tell me which floor he'll choose. Don't get killed.**

Ed sent a wave of wordless befuddlement back. He wanted to know _why_, more than anything.

**Interesting things don't happen every day, silly. That's why they're exciting. A relief from the tedium of our everyday lives!**

Ed protested—he, of course, _liked_ tedium. It was _safe_.

**Shut up. Just do exactly as I say and you won't be in any danger.**

Ed gave a mental sigh and scurried off to do as his mistress asked. She asked a lot, sometimes.

**I heard that. Don't make me squash you.**

She watched through Ed's eyes as Mercer damn near kicked down the door to one apartment. She watched as the BlackWatch soldier inside, who held a woman hostage, had his throat stabbed clean through by a vicious punch from the hooded man. She watched as Mercer tried to comfort the blue-eyed brunette, as she flinched despite calling him her brother, and the shadow-queen grinned to herself in the shadows far below. **Well then, I'll leave them alone. Oh **_**puppies**_**, where have you been?**

Her hounds reported back to her that BlackWatch was already moving in. **Damn, that was quick. They must all stay in constant radio contact. Well then, slow them down. Make them waste bullets. If his earlier performance is any hint, Mercer will eat them alive anyway—probably literally—but his sister is not bulletproof. You are. Now, go!**

Less than a minute later, she could hear gunfire through her link to Ed's mind. Predictably, the Mercer siblings took off running. With her shadow-hounds fighting BlackWatch off less than ten feet from the front entrance to the apartment complex, they would probably be taking the fire escape.

**Good boys.**

She melted away into the ground, job complete.

It wasn't long before she discovered that the Mercers had escaped into the city's drainage system. Admittedly, she had been in the process of heading back to her underground lair anyway—none of her creatures could survive for long in direct sunlight—but this was just too perfect. She silently ordered her legions to stop the pair from leaving, but to otherwise leave them alone. Her nearest pack of shadow-hounds reported that they didn't seem to be in a rush. **Just a precaution**, she told them.

**Ed, come here. I know you don't want to be there. You never did like hanging out with people you didn't know.** She felt the tiny shadow merge with the damp darkness and speed on his way to rejoin her. It only took an instant for her to welcome him back into the fold. Now it was only a matter of finding a form appropriate to greet the visitors.

**Still, I wish this wasn't so hard. I must be out of practice. I mean, I can't even remember the last time I had **_**legs**_**.** Forcing a shape to the darkness was something only possible in the light. Regardless, she tried to confine her dimensions to a reasonably-sized humanoid shape. It wouldn't hold for long—she had spent too long away from direct sunlight to really remember what shape she was supposed to have—but it would do for now. It was a rush-job, after all.

She found Ed among her pets and picked him up. As usual, he shook.

She pulled on one of his antennae. **Calm down, stupid. They couldn't hurt us if they tried**, she said silently. He didn't stop twitching, though, not even as they both approached the pair of intruders into their sunless domain.

* * *

Dana came to a stop near the dead-end that seemed to be the only dry place in the underground. She sank against one wall of the tunnel, panting. Only when she sat down did her breathing slow at all.

"I need your help." Alex said quietly, trying not to scare her again. Dana shook her head, hugging her knees.

"Jesus…I knew something fucked-up was happening at GENTEK—what the hell happened to you, Alex?" She said it very quickly, almost despairing.

He could only shrug helplessly. If he couldn't remember what had happened to him before waking up in the morgue, how could he be expected to remember what had happened to him? His memories were limited to exactly half a second before the pathologists had run out, screaming for someone to kill him. Everything before that was a complete blank, the memories of the two devoured BlackWatch soldiers notwithstanding.

Dana went on, almost in a rant, "I've been researching that whole fucked-up organization for weeks, poking around to get _you_ information." Her voice became desperate. "Don't you remember? You wanted to find out what was going on at the highest levels of GENTEK. Anything about the director of research."

There was a brief flash of a memory—an ID badge. Raymond McMullen…

"Are you okay?" Dana asked.

"Congratulations, it's the Daily Double. Would you like me to attempt to answer that for you, or would you like to try for yourself?" Both of the Mercer siblings jumped at the sound of that voice. It had a wavering, echoing quality that gave the impression that the speaker was at the bottom of a well. Alex stepped into the center of the tunnel and felt, rather than saw, Dana get up to stand behind him.

This end of the tunnel was a dead end. Even with the light of coming from the storm drain overhead, he couldn't see much. Except for the eyes.

There were two glowing eyes there, just hanging in the darkness about five and a half feet in the air, over a faint glint that indicated a mouth filled with needle-like teeth. As he watched, the "face" seemed to get closer. Then a second set of eyes, these ones yellow and at about waist height, became visible. Dana grabbed his arm.

"Jesus…" Alex breathed. For a minute, he could forget that he was apparently a monster in his own right. Whoever this other person was, she was freakier.

"No, I'm not a religious experience, but it's nice of you to say so." The grin widened. "Hello there."

"Who the _hell_ are you?" Alex demanded. _**What**__ the hell are you?_

"Inky," the specter said, giggling. "It's a lie, of course, but that's all you get."

"Okay…_Inky_…what are you?" Alex ventured.

"I'm an enemy. Your enemy? Maybe." _Had_ to be female. The giggling gave it away if nothing else did. "Don't be so suspicious!" Then he felt something poke his nose.

_What. The. Hell._ He watched what he assumed was her arm pull back—_Jesus, it was fifteen feet long!_—around the shaft of light and disappear into the darkness on the other side. "What the fu-?!"

"_Shh_!" she—uh, Inky—hissed sharply. Alex looked up when he heard helicopters passing by overhead. Then he looked back and saw Inky staring at him. He could see something like fog moving in the shadows and suppressed a shudders. Just unnerving.

"We're going to need to get out of here." Dana said quietly. "I know a place we can use."

"Okay." Alex said, and he looked back at Inky. He growled at her, "Move."

The shadows shifted and Inky's face disappeared. "No. I don't think so."

Alex felt a surge of frustration, but Dana spoke up first. "Why not?"

The little set of yellow eyes dropped to floor level. After a moment or two, a shape crawled into view on the edge of the light.

A "shape" was the best way to describe the little creature. It was less than a foot tall, with a head larger than its body and stumpy little limbs that hardly supported it. It had a pair of ribbon-like antennae with at least three kinks in each, as well as a wide mouth with craggy suggestions of teeth. It purred and the darkness twisted behind it. Dana stared.

"Both of you are wanted by BlackWatch. One possible hostage, one possible guinea pig." Inky said. Her voice was much lower now, seeming to fall on their ears like a crypt door slamming. "You might say I have a bone to pick with them."

Tendrils of purplish-black fog began to creep around the lighted area. Alex and Dana both backed away out of reflex. Though his sister gripped his left arm, Alex could feel his right arm spasm and try to reorganize into something deadly.

Inky's voice seemed to lower further still. "I _did_ notice that they seem to hate you quite a bit more than normal. Given how many times you were shot, you shouldn't be _breathing_."

"Alex? What's she talking about?" Dana asked cautiously. She let go of his arm and faced him squarely.

_How does she know?_ "Dana, I—" _Hell, __**I**__ don't even know what happened!_ "I think it's a side effect of…all this." He shrugged, and black and red waves of…_something_ pulsed up and down his arms.

"Your musculature is shifting," said Inky. "Fascinating."

Alex looked at the moving dark. "You know what this is?"

"Sort of." Inky said vaguely. "I've looked at a few top secret files in my day, but I never had any real reason to do proper snooping." Something swished in the darkness and her face reappeared on the edge of the circle. "I could, though." The grin was back.

"Alex." Dana said it in a tone that came out as a warning.

"What are you offering?" Alex asked, ignoring her.

"Three things, really. One, if you accept my deal, Ed can fight off anyone who tries to hurt your sister, in case you're off somewhere." At this, the yellow-eyed creature purred. "Two, a military alliance. I'm willing to fight alongside you if I have a chance. And three," here, she grinned, "I can supply information as needed, to a certain degree. In return, well, you'll see. It's not anything you wouldn't end up doing anyway."

"Alex, this doesn't sound like a good idea." Dana whispered.

"Oh, it's not." Inky said playfully. "But since Dr. Alex J. Mercer will most likely be declared a terrorist within a few days, I don't think you have a whole lot of other options."

_A terrorist? What the hell did I—?_ "You're going to tell me everything." Alex growled. The tendrils shifted along his entire body.

"Maybe. Do we have a deal?" Inky asked, and he saw a claw-like hand extend into view.

He felt like he was making a deal with the devil. "Yes."

The hand reached into the light, and as it did so Alex saw the shadow mass burn and shrivel in the sunlight. Inky herself followed, her entire body bubbling and writhing, which made it impossible to tell what she looked like beyond "sort of human, but as if adrift in a fog. Or black fire." As the blackness began to dissipate like so much tar, Inky's hand became normal. Sort of tanned on the back, with lots of freckles.

Alex shook her hand even as the darkness leapt up and swallowed them all.

* * *

**A/N:** …X.x

Typed this in less than two days because inspiration struck and I already have like five chapters written up…

...

Anyway, this is what I'm messing with while _Pieces of Eden_ refuses to get written.


	2. Getting The Ball Rolling

**Chapter Two: Getting The Ball Rolling**

**A/N:** And now for part 2. This is going fast.

Also, to Naniris, Fool'sgold1, and Maverick Hunter Phoenix, thanks for reviewing!

* * *

"What am I supposed to do with this thing?" Dana asked, looking at the little black creature taking up space on her desk. It was hiding behind her computer monitor, but she could see its bright yellow eyes quite clearly.

"Feed him something." Inky suggested from the kitchen, and something made a loud popping noise. "And his name's Ed."

Dana looked back at the yellow eyes staring at her and shuddered. Alex had gone out to search his apartment for clues, but she really wished he hadn't, or at least had thought to take Inky with him. Instead, the shadowy _thing_ had volunteered to stay behind with Dana and "stand guard." While Alex had clearly been uncomfortable with the idea, he'd let her.

Something slid across the desk and Dana watched the yellow eyes shift to follow it instead. She looked, too, and saw a small can of cat food. Then, suddenly, the can disappeared, whole, into the little black monster's wide jaws. Dana winced and then stared. "What the hell is he?"

"A very small trash compactor," Inky replied from behind her. Dana jumped.

"Jesus Christ, don't _do_ that!" Dana snapped, spinning around in her seat. Then, "_Why_ are you naked?" _And why aren't you still a giant woman-shaped ink monster?_

"I don't have any clothes?" Inky suggested, shrugging. "I was about to ask you about that."

_Okay…what the hell?_ Dana groaned. "Just…ugh. Okay, hang on." She got up from the computer chair and steered Inky by the shoulders toward the bedroom. She heard the little black creature follow, its claws scrabbling on the hardwood floor.

"Considering everything that's going on, I'm surprised your friends managed to make it out of the city." Inky said as Dana found the dresser and began rummaging through it.

"They left on vacation a while ago." Dana replied absently. "And if this…thing with the city doesn't end soon, they probably won't come back. Until then, I'm house-sitting."

Inky sighed. Dana made sure to hit her in the face with a pink bra. "Ouch. I think a rhinestone hit me in the eye."

"Start putting them on," Dana said, ignoring the complaint. There wasn't much in the way of actually decent clothes—nothing matched more than one other item. It seemed like they'd taken everything with them when they'd left, which ruled out any outfits that would have made Inky look normal. "None of this is going to match."

"That's fine." Inky replied.

Dana threw what clothes she could find at Inky and walked out. Though Ed still sat at the door like some scolded pet, Dana ignored him and walked back to the computer. Alex had sent her this file nearly a month ago and was still exploring its depths. Now, though…what was she supposed to do if her brother was an amnesiac?

She decided to ignore that and press on.

Dana heard Inky come up behind her this time. She was wearing socks and had managed to collide with the wall while sliding around. The brunette sighed and looked back. "For a monster, you're not very good at being scary."

Inky looked up from the floor, grinning. Dana found herself glad that those teeth were normal now.

Inky actually looked pretty normal, for once. She had long, wavy red hair and bright blue eyes, darker than either of the Mercer siblings'. She had freckles splayed all across her face and arms, and combined with her weird outfit, it somehow turned out okay. _Mostly_. Dana _had_ noticed that Inky's left sock was orange with bats and the other was green with tiny Santas on it. The little black monster wandered over and the redhead tweaked one of his antennae.

Dana opened her mouth to ask a question, but shut it as Inky got up.

"So, what's that?" Inky asked. She leaned heavily on the back of Dana's chair until the brunette swatted her elbow away.

"It's…" Dana brought up the page again. "See this?"

It was a photo. Between two bulky men was a young woman with a dead-eyed stare. In a better light, or in better conditions, she could have been attractive. Classic looks, strawberry-blonde with her hair going all the way down her back. Blood dripping from the side of her mouth, as if someone had hit her recently.

"Looks like a woman. I think I've seen her somewhere before, or someone a lot like her." Inky said. "But…well, it's probably been a while."

"Her name's Elizabeth Greene." Dana muttered. "She's being held at GENTEK." She growled. "Those sick fucks…"

Inky stayed silent. The black shadow-thing that had devoured the cat food—and the can, of course—appeared on the desk again. He purred.

"It doesn't say how long she's been there." Inky offered eventually, after about a minute's silence.

"I don't think Alex knew." Dana replied. "He sent me this a while ago, but now…"

"…He doesn't remember anything." Inky finished. "Tough break."

"Tell me about it." Dana said with a sigh.

Then something strange happened. Inky backed away from the computer and Dana heard a whooshing sound. When she looked back, Inky again was something other than human. She was a woman made of nothing but blackness, with wildly flickering wisps of purple that could broadly be called "hair" surrounding her head. She hadn't noticed that before.

Thud. Thud-thud.

"Your brother will never have to knock again." Inky said, and her voice had gotten the echoing quality back. "If I understand his condition correctly, he's at least four times heavier than he used to be, but the same size." She sounded strangely smart after about two hours of meaningless chattering.

Dana stared at her. "How do you know that?"

"Well, there was this thing, you know, with a BlackWatch soldier—" Inky began, but Dana shook her head and the door opened. Alex was back.

"Alex, how'd it go?" Dana asked, getting up. Inky moved off to the side of the room, trying to be unobtrusive. And failing, but the effort was nice.

"There's nothing left." Alex said, shaking his head. He glanced at Inky. "By the way, why did you decide to stay here?"

Inky made a noise that sounded like "pfft." "Two things—one, I can't use my shadow abilities effectively in direct sunlight, which means I can't fight. Two—I wasn't wearing anything under this. A naked woman walking around Manhattan with a creepy-looking guy in a hoodie? That's going to attract _all_ the wrong kinds of attention."

"You actually have a body under all that?" Ales asked doubtfully, though now Inky seemed to be ignoring him.

"Yes, Alex, she does." Dana cut in. "And anyway, I found something you need to see."

* * *

She sat back, thinking, as the Mercer siblings quickly went over the file on Dana's computer. **Elizabeth Greene…** She had a bad feeling about that name. But she didn't need to remain in the dark. She was still the shadow-queen, and thus her creatures still obeyed her with their minds linked to her own. She needed information.

**Who is Elizabeth Greene?** she asked them.

She received many impressions in return. It took a minute to sort through them all. **Okay, what?** There was always the impression of blood and still something more, like some strange mixture of flesh and bone that had forgotten skin somewhere along the way. Then there was fire, and of course its constant companion, death. Always death, but here there was a distinct edge of disease, not slaughter. And…metal. **What** **the hell indeed. Unrestrained…epidemic?** Her servants, she would admit, were only barely sentient. She couldn't expect them to think much above the level of food/threat/thing/mistress, like true animals did.

Still, all of it indicated that Elizabeth Greene was better off dead. Now she _wanted_ to meet this strange young woman, if only to find out why. Self-preservation had never been among the shadow-queen's more prominent personality traits.

"Mercer, are you going to go see if she can tell you anything?" she asked as Alex began to walk out of the small apartment.

Alex seemed to glance back and Dana looked at her curiously. Then they exchanged glances and Alex said, "Yeah. She might be the only one who can tell me anything."

She nodded to herself. "I'm coming with you, then. It's nearly sunset now, and I'm as curious as you are." Unrestrained curiosity had always been one of her greatest flaws. But still…

Alex shrugged. "Fine." He walked out, and she, the mistress of the night, followed him.

* * *

About five minutes later, due to their mutual lack of need for street-level travel, they both stood on the roof of a building adjacent to the GENTEK facility.

Well, Alex stood—as he looked to his right, Inky's body seemed to continually wavering and collapsing in on itself. Despite that, though, she didn't seem bothered by it.

"How do you plan on getting inside? They have tanks down there." Inky's voice came from somewhere within the writhing black mass. He couldn't see a face.

"Distraction." Alex said gruffly.

Inky seemed to pause, considering it, before her actual body rose up out of the mess. She was _shaped_ sort of like a human, if a human seen through an acid trip and missing certain vital components called _legs_. Everything below her waist was a formless mass of black. She looked down at the courtyard far below and then, with her head turning around a full 180 degrees, said, "Or you could eat one of them, take his appearance, and then sneak inside."

He wasn't sure why that idea appealed to him, but he shook off the feeling nonetheless. Instead, Inky got to watch as he was engulfed in a mass of red and black that squelched and slithered. When the display was over, a BlackWatch trooper stood where a man in a leather jacket and hood had been.

"Oooh," said Inky, and she clapped. "Amazing."

"Let's just get this over with." Alex growled, uncomfortable. He'd killed the man whose skin he wore now in an effort to both defend himself and find Dana. Already he could visualize the man's last moments—being lifted into the air by what he had thought was a subordinate…

Inky just grinned at him with teeth like silver needles. "Meet you inside." Then she vanished into the puddle of shadow and, as he watched it disappear over the edge of the building, Alex swore.

Why that manipulative, scheming—she'd had a way in the whole time! And now he didn't.

"The front door it is, then." Alex muttered.

* * *

He'd had to consume two soldiers, a scientist, and a janitor to figure out which floor Greene was being held on. In the end, though, he hadn't needed much more help than that. As soon as he stepped off the elevator he was hit by dozens of sensations. Blood _everywhere_, at least six BlackWatch troopers dead, then there was the slick substance on the floor that _wasn't_ blood because it clung to the walls in a throbbing mass and then there was the _strong_ sensation of being watched—

"Hey, glad you could make it," came Inky's voice from the ceiling. Though Alex didn't flinch this time, he did look up. He wasn't surprised when he saw her grinning down at him.

"What the hell was that back there?" Alex demanded. Even as he spoke, his form returned to his default one. If he had been less annoyed, he would have noticed that it didn't feel any different to be Alex Mercer again.

"What? Leaving you?" Inky asked as she dropped to the floor like a mutant raindrop before reforming. At least she had legs this time, rather than something akin to tentacles, even if they ended in two clawed toes each. She had clearly-defined hair this time, too, though it looked more like smoke than anything. "I knew you'd get in just fine." She shrugged with shoulders shaped like blocks. "Besides, my method doesn't work for normal humans."

Alex stared. The crawling sensation started in his arms this time. "Somehow, I don't think I count as a normal human anymore."

Inky waved him off. "No, but I bet you can't survive being squashed flat to get under a two-ton steel door."

Alex fought the urge to roll his eyes. Looking back at the gore-strewn hallway, he said, "Don't tell me this is how you found it."

"Actually…" Inky began, but Alex chose to ignore her. With the…female…trailing behind, he walked over the bodies and the throbbing red mass and made his way to a door that had been jammed open by the body of yet another BlackWatch soldier.

He walked through.

The room was huge, but bare except for the now-expected red mass everywhere, and the observation chamber. It looked like it was made of glass, but no glass ever built could hold someone for long. In the center of the chamber, under a bright, almost scientific, light, was a woman. She sat there in the chair, in the fetal position, and didn't move then Alex and Inky knocked at the door. Well, Alex knocked. Inky played the first half of "Shave and a Haircut" on the glass and waited for a response.

It was definitely Greene. Granted, she'd had about half a buzz-cut since the photo on Dana's computer, but it didn't change much.

"Looks like her." Inky said. "So, anyway…"

Alex pulled the door open, seeming to forget that there was a deadbolt on it until the hinges gave way. He paused only for a few seconds before shaking his head and setting the door aside. Then he walked into the chamber. Ripping a door off its hinges wasn't important.

Alex walked up to her cautiously, with Inky waiting in the doorway. Neither woman seemed inclined to move at all. _Oh well._ "Elizabeth?" he asked, and he was surprised at how timid he sounded.

Then Elizabeth Greene looked up. "**The time…for waiting…is **_**over**_**…**" Alex jerked back almost out of reflex—_Jesus_, what the hell was wrong with her _voice_—right before she stood up straight and backhanded him.

The blow knocked all the air out of him and sent him flying. Distantly, he heard Inky's distinctive "schlurp" as she got out of the way by flattening herself to the floor, right before he hit the opposite wall head- and shoulders-first. To a degree, he was lucky—he had apparently been thrown into one of the lumpy, pulsating patches on the wall. On the other, the fact that he was still alive meant he had to deal with her.

Alex heard Inky shriek in that otherworldly voice of hers and managed to struggle onto all fours just as the shadow-woman lashed out. The spots in his vision faded in time for him to see three of Inky's tendrils evaporate in midair before ever touching Greene—_shit, the UV light—_and watch as Greene grabbed one of the remaining ones and flung her aside.

It was hard to imagine this Greene as the strawberry-blonde who had looked so utterly hopeless before.

"Ow…you godsdamned _bitch_," groaned Inky from somewhere in the darkness.

Greene moved slowly, almost as if she was on a catwalk, until she stood close to the wall. She was right next to Alex's right hand. If he had been able to reach out, he could have touched her. He felt his head throb and nearly all thought fled from the sudden, intense pain. It felt like when he had been shot earlier, only now there was a wedge being driven into his skull with a jackhammer. Again came the crawling sensation from his arms, but he was unable to even comprehend it.

"Who…who are you?" Alex growled through the pain and gritted teeth, aware that it was a stupid question and that he had meant something else. _**What**__ the hell are you, Greene?_

Elizabeth Greene spoke, in that voice that sounded like steel on steel, or a whisper in the dark, "**I am your mother.**"

"What?" Alex wasn't sure if he'd managed to say it aloud or not, but it didn't matter.

Greene put a hand against the wall and it exploded outward, showering them both in concrete dust. Then Alex watched as she stepped right off the edge and disappeared into the night. It took a moment for the pain to fade and in that moment, Alex realized that Greene had just walked off a fifty-one-story drop.

"Agh…" Well, Inky seemed fine. He saw her walking unsteadily toward him, holding her head. Alex got to his feet on the second attempt and, apparently seeing this, Inky said grumpily, "Well, thanks for being useless."

Alex scowled at her and was about to reply when he heard something rip. Then the sound of some liquid hitting the floor and he heard Inky make a noise like, "Ghkt!"

"Do you want to know what's behind you?" Inky asked in a small voice.

Alex looked at the creature rearing up behind Inky. It had the build of a cross between a man, an ape, and a very nasty dog, but it was nine feet long and stood seven feet high. Its forehead glowed purple—bioluminescence, something told him—and it roared with a mouth so large it seemed to split the creature's head in two.

He thought about it. "No. I already figured it out."

And then they were both knocked out of the hole in the side of the building. Alex hit the ground, cracking the pavement like a meteorite impact, about two seconds later. By that point, Inky had disappeared.

* * *

Alex was in no mood to be shot at, but that had never stopped anyone before and certainly didn't stop the United States Marine Corps unit stationed on GENTEK's doorstep. Still, when he heard the first of the creatures land loudly behind him, he ignored the flying bullets and the Marines' cry of, "That's him, open fire!"

He grabbed the nearest soldier as the first of the creatures landed. "I need to know what you know." Alex said almost apologetically. And then the tentacles sprung out again and latched onto the soldier's body and he was being devoured.

"_Yes, private, you're guarding a hole in the fucking roof. You've been briefed about what we're up against—we're not safe until these skylights are sealed. So, unless you want to pull shit patrol until your momma forgets what you look like, stand your sorry ass right here until you're told to do otherwise. NOW MOVE IT!"_

"_Sir!"_

Okay, now he had a destination. He ran straight at the Marines at top speed. Then up and over the barricade and suddenly he was speeding away at more than sixty miles per hour.

They could no more catch him than catch a speeding bullet. Unfortunately, as he vaulted over a taxi, he realized that the creatures _could_.

Well, _fuck_. He kept running.

Then, he spotted a building—_military_ _base, doesn't matter which army_—oh, it's that one. The fact that it was even there gave Alex an option to hide, even if thinking about how he knew it gave him a headache. _Or_, Alex thought cynically, _at least I can pick my own fights_.

Alex ran right up the side of the building, onto the roof, and, knocking down the one guard he found, dropped through the open, impromptu skylight. He ended up dropping around six stories and cracking the ground where he landed. _Again_.

Of course, he happened to land in the middle of an entire crowd of Marines. Today was just not his day.

"What the hell is—it's Mercer!" Oh _Jesus_, not again… And then there came the hail of bullets, even as he ran to the side to get mostly out of the way. He _did_ notice—as he picked up a rocket launcher—that being shot didn't hurt so much anymore. He probably would have been able to ignore the Marines entirely—he had more dangerous things to worry about—if they had just stopped _shouting_ for five seconds.

By the time he had leveled the weapon, the first of the monsters from before had dropped through the ceiling.

"I don't know what you are," Alex growled as it approached, "but I know I'm gonna kill you."

Of course, it then took that moment to double its speed and Alex made a quick calculation in his head. It probably outweighed him by a factor of at least two. _Okay, __**not**__ good_. As the Marines panicked and switched targets to it instead of him, Alex fired directly at it. No way in hell was he letting that thing get out unscathed. When it managed to jump out of the resulting cloud of smoke and debris, though, and almost directly on top of him, Alex threw the weapon in its face before rolling to the side. It brought its huge fists down where he had been.

Again his arms throbbed and this time he punched the monster that hunted him so persistently—_a Hunter_, whispered something he didn't quite understand—squarely in the face with all his strength. It went down, half its lower jaw knocked almost around its head while the other end had stayed attached. Teeth and tongue and blood were all exposed now.

The rest happened almost reflexively. He grabbed its head and twisted, hard, as black tendrils ripped themselves free from his back and latched on next to his hands. Suddenly there were bits of blood and bone and spinal fluid splattered everywhere and he was holding up a severed head that had frozen in a terrible roar. The tendrils throbbed and the head was reduced to a consumable mass. Even as his body drank it in, he felt his arms pulse again and by the time the head was fully integrated, the transformation was complete.

A quick flex confirmed that his elbows still worked, though he wasn't sure _how_. Both arms were covered in curved, spiked black armor that moved with him easily in defiance of logic and ended in two-foot silver claws that moved whenever he tried to use his fingers. After a few seconds, he realized that these new weapons _were_ his hands and arms, only several times as deadly.

"You look like death on legs." Alex blinked and looked around for the voice. _That was definitely Inky, but she wasn't_…he gave up. "Yeah, I'm hiding. Don't look for me." That sounded really, _really_ close…

Alex decided to ignore it and watched another five Hunters drop from multiple points in the ceiling. The fifth, though, was snatched out of the air by a black tentacle and smashed into ground on top of one of its fellows, and Alex saw Inky lurking on one of the hanging fluorescent lights above his head.

"More of them. And I'm just getting started." Alex said, and started to laugh. It was a low, menacing, utterly humorless sound and the three remaining Hunters immediately charged him. He found that he didn't really mind and ran to meet them.

Bullets were flying into the fray as Alex swiped at the first one's face. It fell away, apparently blinded, and he realized that the wounds were shallow. Either they had very thick hides or he wasn't able to divide his strength between all four claws effectively. It was like getting a lucky shot in while hitting a rabid dog with a rake. _Damn it_.

_Well, __**fine**_. Then he'd just find a better way. The second one moved in, roaring, and he stabbed it through its open mouth. He shoved his arm into its ribcage from there even as it jerked and tried to trip his other arm off, shredding everything above its collarbone, and splayed his fingers/claws out inside its chest cavity. _Power at a point_. He hooked his claws on a lower set of ribs, trying to ignore the squish of flesh being sliced apart and the frantic pounding the Hunter gave to his head and shoulders.

And then, straining, he threw the dying Hunter at the one behind it, which had been trying to push its way past, and dove away as the third came from behind and tried to flatten him.

Alex twisted and slashed at the one that had been behind him, catching its leading arm and making it pull back momentarily. When he went to stab it in the stomach, though, the Hunter he'd distracted ran up and pounced on him. Or tried to. Though it managed to knock him to the ground, the fact that he was then able to rip it open from throat to hip and spill its organs everywhere mitigated the victory somewhat.

He slashed the last one across the throat as he stood up. It died gurgling pathetically while still making an attempt to beat him to death and Alex walked away, trying to brush the blood and intestine from his clothes without slicing himself to ribbons. When he looked up, yet more Hunters dropped from that same damned point in the ceiling. One, two, three, four…eleven. _Fuck_. His eyes narrowed and he snarled, "They keep coming,_ I_ keep killing."

Alex looked around as the Marines alternated between shooting at him, shooting at the Hunters, or getting mauled. They weren't much of a distraction for the creatures, unless the soldiers stood directly between them and Alex, in which case the Hunters ending up biting their heads off—head, helmet, com-link, _everything_. Even with Inky being something akin to a malicious industrial crane and pounding any Hunters she could reach into paste, now they were coming too fast for either her or Alex to fight off.

_Okay, what do we have? It's gotta be big…_ Alex thought as he flipped away from a mob of Hunters—_why_ did they all hate him?—and landed on top of a Humvee. The Humvee was hooked up to a huge cylinder that reached practically three stories high via a long hose and Alex realized belatedly, as one of the Hunters tried to on him and he brought his clawed fist down on its head, that they were fuel tanks. _Massive_ fuel tanks.

"Where are the rocket launchers?" Alex shouted at Inky over the roars of the Hunters and the sound of metal tearing as still more of them arrived.

"How the flying fuck am I supposed to know?" she yelled back, wrapping a black tentacle around one's neck and flinging it into a crate of ammunition. It exploded.

No help there. Okay, rocket launchers… It was too bad all of the Marines had gotten themselves killed, or else he would have just asked. He almost immediately was mobbed by five Hunters as he tried to start searching. He went down in a writhing, flailing tangle of bodies and struck out wildly, trying to break free. Blood rained everywhere but he couldn't _breathe_—!

"Hey, Mercer! Catch!" Black tentacles swept around him and the Hunters were swatted away, and he saw something shaped like a tube tumbling through the air. "I don't even know what this is but you can have it!" She was promptly surrounded by Hunters leaping into the air and Alex heard her yelp. "Get off me, you fat fu—!"

Alex snatched it out of the air. Definitely a rocket launcher. She must have gotten lucky there. He ignored her repeated curses and aimed at the fuel tank. He fired.

The world exploded.

* * *

_Ding_!

Dana was about to take her instant dinner from the microwave. It wasn't healthy—she sometimes wondered if the food had been reconstituted from something else entirely—but she couldn't exactly walk around New York City when the military had made it clear that she was a target. She wasn't exactly sure how, but Dana was sure they had found out that she had gotten the files from Alex a while ago. It was a little surprising they had waited a month to find her, though.

_**BOOM**_.

She stopped dead, with the plastic fork still in her mouth. She looked around, though the safe house's one window was too high for her to reach anyway. _What the hell? That was definitely an explosion, but…it didn't sound like it was that far away_. _Maybe a dozen blocks_. There wasn't a—what kind of _anything_ could make that kind of sound in the Big Apple?

Dana tried to put it out of her mind and went back to the computer. Since that guy from BlackWatch had tried to kill her, she'd been paranoid. The city wasn't safe anymore.

Everything was going to hell so fast now. She'd only have to look on the streamed broadcasts to find out that BlackWatch was taking over, the USMC were losing a hundred men a day, her brother had been declared a terrorist, being accused of _causing_ the virus outbreak at Penn Station…

Dana felt like strangling someone, preferably a newscaster. There was _no_ way Alex was responsible for all of this, but everyone loved a scapegoat. But this was her _brother_. _Okay, so maybe Alex was always a bit cold and doesn't care a whole lot about other people, but he would never do something so cruel to so many people!_ She'd looked at the death toll—over three hundred thousand people dead already—but it could have gone up by hundreds more since this morning. She hadn't checked back since.

Dana sighed. Her brother had changed a lot in the last five years, but even that hadn't been much compared to the shift over the last few days. It was like he was another person—focused, but hopelessly confused and fiercely protective of her in a way he hadn't been since they were both children. She hardly knew how to deal with him anymore.

And then there was Inky. Dana didn't know anything about her and _really_ didn't think Alex knew much more. All the same, though, she didn't seem to mean any actual harm. At least, working with her seemed like a better idea than without her. Dealing with Inky earlier had made her seem much less scary, too. Even less than Alex, actually, who Dana privately admitted scared her a lot now.

But, still…Dana leaned heavily on the desk with one elbow as she poked at her food. Damn it, she missed how things used to be. She hadn't really _liked_ her life before as a single, amateur journalist living alone in the middle of New York City, estranged from her nine-years-older brother, with their parents living on opposite ends of the continent, but it had been a safe life. No deadly viruses, no occupation force…

Now her friends were all either dead or ten million miles away, her brother was the military's primary target, and they'd made a deal with some crazy, shadow-controlling bitch that zoned out every five minutes. Yeah, things were really looking up. She wanted the old days back so badly it almost hurt.

Ed came out from behind the computer and, for once, Dana didn't care that he put his big head on the mouse pad. She stroked him absentmindedly as the clock struck midnight. She finally allowed her head to drop against one folded arm and she closed her eyes. It would only be for a few minutes, anyway…

* * *

**A/N:** And there is part two!

So, thoughts, anyone? What do you all think of Alex? What do you think of Dana? Inky? Feel free to PM me if you feel like details need explaining.

Also, hitting _anything_ with a crappy metal garden rake (like the one I have) is just asking for whatever it was to come and kill you.


	3. Being Human

**Chapter Three: Being Human **

**A/N:** Entering part three; in which Karen Parker, USMC Sgt. Paul Jackson, and the ability to operate armored vehicles with impunity are introduced.

Also, Happy Singles Appreciation Day.

* * *

Alex and Inky left hiding sometime around 3 a.m. the next morning.

"That was sort of fun." Inky said as they walked off a side street. "And I hope I never have to do something that stupid again. What the hell did you hit, jet fuel?"

"I thought it was diesel. I didn't think it would make the whole place catch _fire_." Alex growled in a voice not his own, shrugging. Since their escape from the demolished military base, they had been trying to keep something approaching a low profile. Alex, for his part, had taken the form of one of the Marines he had killed earlier, while Inky had simply dropped all of her shadow armor and was now an ordinary, redheaded twenty-something walking down the street. "Are you actually human, or is that another mask?" he asked.

"Hah." Inky said. It wasn't really a laugh. "I'm mostly human, barring a few technicalities. But something went wrong in the blood like fifty generations back and now I get to be a shadowy person whose greatest fear is a _break in the cloud cover_." There was an unspoken thought attached to the end: _And that is so fucking stupid I can't even think about it_. "You?"

"I'm a shape-shifting, apparently immortal _thing_ that eats people and happens to have a little sister he'd like to get home to." Alex said in a monotone. "I think we'd better get going, anyway."

"Blah. You go. I still have like two hours of nighttime to drive the local wildlife insane." Inky said, waving him off. "I'll stop by later."

"You're sure?" he asked, but she was already walking off, giving him an offhand wave without even turning. "Fine."

Alex found out later that she had managed to grab one of the few taxis still working in the city and head off to parts unknown, but he was forced to use the rooftops like before. Though he had to admit, being able to run directly up the side of a building was a definite plus. And he also discovered that he could glide if he wanted to, by expelling excess biomass from his wrists and ankles. Very convenient, if also highly disturbing.

He arrived at the complex where Dana's safe house was located in less than ten minutes and descended from the rooftop door.

All the while, Alex was thinking. That last fight had shown him that he would gain new abilities as time went on. He didn't know exactly how, but apparently his body would adapt rapidly to new challenges by changing into various types of weapons. He already felt like a human Swiss army knife, and he suspected that there were still more than a few possibilities left that he just hadn't found yet.

He found Dana's door and felt around the top of the doorframe. She had just shown him this trick yesterday._ Okay…no…gum. Key_. _That's it_. He unlocked the door silently, putting the key in his pocket, and went inside.

Alex first noticed that the apartment was completely dark aside from the lights from the stove and the computer. He had to blink a few times and then stand with his eyes closed for a moment in order to see anything.

Dana was asleep in her chair next to the computer, her head on the desk. As he watched, something jet-black detached itself from the darkness of the computer processor, and Alex recognized it by its glowing yellow eyes right before he would have flattened it. _Ed_.

He heard someone enter and glanced back to see Inky squeeze under the door in a pool of liquid black before attempting to sort herself out, at which point he looked back at Dana. Ed sat next to her head, purring like someone had decided to attach a clarinet to a car's tailpipe. It was completely unique and incredibly grating.

"I guess she sat up waiting for us." Inky said softly. "I don't think she's slept in two days."

"How can you tell?" Alex asked in a whisper, walking over to his sleeping sister. _And why are you back early?_

"Just a guess." Inky whispered back. "Anyway, you'd better get her to an actual bed. She'll wake up with a cramp if she stays like that."

Alex looked at the shadow-woman, or at least where her eyes were, and then shrugged to himself. Very carefully, he lifted Dana out of her chair and carried her to the bedroom while Inky helpfully opened the door with one tendril. His sister woke up as he was setting her down. Sort of, anyway.

"…Alex?" Dana asked blearily. She hadn't even opened her eyes. "That had better be you, Alex…"

"Yeah, it's me." Alex said, pulling the blankets back for her. Though, honestly, what had she planned on doing if he wasn't?

"Figured…" she mumbled. She kicked off her shoes and squirmed under the covers. "…should be working…"

"Don't worry." Alex assured her. "I can wait." And _I can get Inky to look into things if I have to_.

Dana blinked up at him, and then yawned. "'Kay…"

"All right. Just get some sleep, Dana." Alex said. He began to walk out of the room.

"…Alex?"

"Yeah?"

"…look up Karen Parker." There was another yawn. "…on the laptop…"

"Okay. Thanks, Dana." Alex made sure to close the door as quietly as possible.

Inky was waiting for him in the kitchen. She was not even pretending to be human anymore, to the point that she didn't have legs this time either. Just a mass of dark tentacles, though it seemed like she was sitting on the countertop. Alex walked over to her.

"Do you want me to go out and scout around?" she asked. "There's still long enough that I could do some extra snooping, free of charge."

"Or you could look after Dana while I go find Karen Parker." Alex suggested shortly.

"Who's that?" Inky asked, her slanted blue eyes disappearing momentarily. She could blink?

There was a flash of a memory, just like when Dana had told him about Elizabeth Greene and when he had encountered Greene herself not much later. It manifesting in the form of a splitting headache that lasted about half a second and the image of a test tube fill with red liquid.

"Mercer?" Inky's echoing voice seemed even further away than usual.

A moment or so later, Alex straightened, panting. "Ex-girlfriend. I saw her picture in my apartment before it was destroyed…"

"Must have been _some_ ex-girlfriend." Inky muttered as he went over to Dana's computer and shook the mouse. The screen took a while to react, but when it did the room lit up suddenly and Inky started swearing. "The light! It _buuurns_…"

Alex ignored her and looked at the page on screen. "Okay…" Upper West Side? That was it? Well, if that was where her apartment was located…

"I'll stay here, then." Inky said it in a tone approaching a whine. "But I'm going to have to lease in a while if I'm going to keep up with things."

Alex somehow contrived to glare at her without actually turning his head.

"Fine," she snapped. Her voice trailed off into a mutter of, "_Jesus_, you're worse than a mother hen…"

"Look, you can do whatever you want so long as you make sure Dana's safe." Alex growled. "I don't care."

"Really?" Her mood did a complete flip yet again. He was starting to wonder if she was bipolar or just honestly that childish. "All right, deal. Ed?"

Alex watched the little creature form on the countertop. The eyes always showed up last, except for the antennae, which unfolded one at a time. He promptly disappeared under the computer again, whining.

"How good is that thing in a fight?" Alex asked, his blue-gray eyes narrowed.

"Better than average." Inky replied. "He could probably beat a Hunter in one-on-one, but he's better if you let him partner up with someone."

"Like how?" Alex asked suspiciously.

"You'll see, if we're unlucky." Inky said. "Anyway, I did a bit of brief spying on BlackWatch, and I found out something big. I came back as fast as I could. Do you want to hear what they said?"

Alex blinked. She'd actually gone out and been useful? _This_ was a surprise. He had expected her promises to be entirely empty. "Definitely."

"Good. I was just told about it a couple of minutes ago, by my spies in BlackWatch headquarters." Inky sat back and Alex took it as a sign that the conversation would take a while. "It started like this…"

* * *

**About ten minutes ago…**

* * *

**So, what have you found out? **the shadow-queen asked her many, many subordinates.

As usual, they all clamored for her attention and tried to give the fullest account they could. It was almost endearing. It probably would have been slightly more effective if she hadn't spawned every last one of them from a segment of her mind and some of her body's wispy material. They were, down to the last one, absolutely expendable. After all, they were a part of her.

She eventually singled out Bat as the only one who could tell a coherent story. It wasn't any more intelligent than the others, but it was almost as independent as Ed. That counted for something. **So, Bat, what do you have?**

Bat, being the most skilled of her spies, had been assigned to hide along the ceiling of BlackWatch headquarters, along with hundreds of its compatriots, to gather information. He had been there for a full day after Mercer's initial escape and had plenty to report.

It was kind of funny how BlackWatch, for all their reported insane skill at espionage and stealth, couldn't eliminate their weakest link—the civilian facility that couldn't seem to keep samples from escaping. **Ah, the wonders of human overconfidence**.

* * *

"Can you get on with it? I only have so much time to spend listening to you narrating everything."

"Oh, come on. I'm soliloquizing. Don't you have any sense of dramatic pacing?"

"No."

* * *

_**ANYWAY, you impatient idiot…**_

* * *

Bat had been hanging out, upside-down, on the ceiling RED CROWN command center. It watched as a one-armed old man stood at a computer, trying to draw something on the screen. Behind him stood a man all in black, with a white streak in his hair. For its part, Bat just widened its huge ears and listened, since it couldn't actually make out any facial features that well in the bright light.

"Axiom will sweep to the river, Brimstone will encircle the entire sector and contain anyone moving through the area," the old man was saying. Bat noticed that he wore green in the military style that it was becoming so familiar with now, with a big, durable belt and probably a dozen pouches. "I want this contained by daybreak."

The man on the big screen, also wearing black but in an entirely different style from the first man, said, "Sir, there are nearly one hundred thousand people in the blue zone—"

"I'm not interested in excuses," the old man interrupted. "Get it done." As the man on the screen shut up, the man standing behind the older one, at attention, moved forward. The old man turned to speak to him. "We have a situation I think your team is well-suited for, Captain. How long until your men are in place?"

The first man in black body armor said, "We're prepped and waiting for orders. We can be wheels up and boots on the ground anywhere in the city in fifteen." There was about half a pause. "With respect, sir, a suppression operation in a city of twelve million is _slightly_ more than my men can handle."

"The situation has already evolved, Captain," said the old man. "You're not participating in the containment action. Your team has a single target—Alex Mercer, codename ZEUS. He's carrying a new strain. He's eliminated fifty of my men and smashed through a two-foot steel door. You interested?"

"I'm your man," said the one in black.

The old man nodded and turned away. "I don't need to tell you what's at stake."

Bat blinked with a pair of bright yellow eyes and crammed the information into its tiny, slightly faulty brain. Hopefully this was important enough to make it back to its mistress.

* * *

"Who was the old man?" Alex asked. Then he added, "And when was this?"

Inky shrugged. "Bat's too dense to figure out names. But I figure it's General Randall, head of BlackWatch. From what I can tell, and the daylight Bat remembers, I'd guess that the meeting was about four to five hours before we ever went after Greene."

"Shit." Alex muttered. "This is just great." _I'm_ _five hours behind these crazy fucks_.

"It could be worse. You could be dead, or your sister could be a hostage." Inky said. "Now, shoo. I'll stay here for a bit."

Alex gave her a sharp, blue-gray stare before turning and leaving the apartment.

* * *

She sat around waiting for a while—three useless hours of doing nothing but checking in with her information network—before she got up from the armchair and left. She left Ed to watch over Dana before walking right out the door, at least. Though she made sure to lock it with her shadow powers before she left, she had no intention of paying much attention to the safe house or its occupant for much longer.

She had to be on the hunt. She needed to know more about the soon-to-be three-way battle, and fortunately for the rest of Manhattan, she already knew who and what to look for. And her methods were (mostly) nonlethal, whereas Mercer seemed utterly incapable of minimizing collateral damage. She only needed to corner the right idiot so she could dangle him off a building.

The shadow-queen sighed. **Well, Mercer should be busy for a day or two.** She didn't have to start interrogating people yet, exactly.

**Except…wait, Karen Parker? If she worked for GENTEK, and Mercer woke up there, and McMullen is the project director, and it's a front for BlackWatch, and…well, fuck, now I have to work again. I should really stop thinking in layers.**

And after she figured out Karen Parker? **Hell, I'm going on vacation**. **Helping Mercer kill things (and it's not like he **_**needs**_** help) is slightly secondary to providing for Dana. When was the last time she went shopping?**

**Off I go, into the Em-pire Ci-ty-!** And the shadow-queen walked off, singing to herself and her minions.

* * *

Of _course_ Karen Parker's apartment block was located in the middle of a battlefield. Alex only had to look down at the right moment to see Infected getting mowed down by the dozens or, otherwise, the military being forced to retreat. The tides of battle seemed to shift every few seconds. _They're still distracted, though. They haven't secured Parker yet. At least, I hope not._

He jumped down from the rooftop, ducking behind a car to avoid being shot at for the fifty-millionth time, and, after accidentally knocking down a man in an overly-large sweater, went in the front door. It was probably the first time he had used a normal entrance in days.

Finding Karen's apartment so easily was, frankly, worrying. Though Dana hadn't mentioned anything, Alex was fairly sure that, if Dana could find his ex-girlfriend's address, so could nearly everyone else. It could be a trap…

He knocked and entered cautiously, remembering how he had found a BlackWatch soldier trying to kill Dana not too long ago. Even if he didn't quite remember Karen, already he was feeling a certain level of dislike—verging on hate—for BlackWatch in all their forms. He didn't want anyone to be hurt by them.

Alex stood in the doorway, feeling awkward for about a second. Then he shifted his weight a little and said quietly, "Karen Parker?"

The blonde woman jumped and turned. She stared. "I thought you were dead!" There was an edge of relief in her voice that made Alex pause for a moment.

"I should be." Alex murmured, recalling the sheer amount of abuse his body had been through in less than twenty-four hours. As Inky had deftly put it last night, he shouldn't have been breathing, much less running around on rooftops and taking on the military wherever he found them.

Then Karen Parker did something unexpected. She hugged him. Alex froze. So far, he was already used to reactions of fear, even utter terror and anger, but this sudden burst of familiarity and affection was completely alien. Even Dana hadn't tried to hug him—though he had noticed that she would depend on his protection if there was something scarier around—and he was left blinking at Karen as she let go.

Alex forced his thoughts back to the task at hand as Karen backed away to give him space. "We need to get out of the military cordon," he said, shaking his head slightly.

Karen stared at him for a moment before saying, "You need to get us a vehicle." She paused, thinking that over, and added, "A military one, if possible. It's the only way we'll be able to get out of the district."

Alex wordlessly turned away and walked out. He already had something in mind…but first, he had to get out, onto the street. Where the Hunters were. _Jesus, it's __**never**__ my day, is it?_

Still, he wasn't going to get anywhere if he stayed inside. He stepped out onto the red-smeared street and looked around at the rapidly-spawning Infected, the fleeing civilians, and the still-living military. He glanced up at the building again. _Hive._ What had once been an ordinary warehouse was now covering in the same red clumps that had marked Greene's holding cell before. Only now they erupted freely, and every one of them dropped a Hunter.

_That red stuff is spreading fast. Person to person, building to building, street to street. It has to be connected to Elizabeth Greene._

He started to run. It was all a question of finding someone who knew how to drive a tank, or at least knew where he could find someone who could. Those would be officers—BlackWatch or Marine, it didn't really matter—which were identifiable by their rank insignias. Alex quickly realized one major problem with this—namely, the Hunters' tendency to go after him. And _only_ him.

This resulted in the damn things throwing _cars_ at him, flattening whoever he had been about to interrogate.

It took about two minutes for him to catch a BlackWatch officer who hadn't been smashed into pulp by a flying Honda—_two minutes I don't __**have**_—and (via throwing him to the ground and violently beating him into paste) consume him. He forced any irrelevant memories down, not wanting to see exactly what the man had been (because he was starting to get a good idea of that just from their conduct), only what he knew. _Where are the tanks?_

_Of course they're halfway across the fucking city_.

He took off running, only stopping to disguise himself as the officer he'd just absorbed. Next step, find a base with one or two spare tanks…

_Okay…now that I'm here, I need a…identity scanner. Wait, no, I need access—only the base commander can get in? What the hell? This is so confusing. _Unfortunately, he was starting to realize that practically everything he had to do in the city would involve absorbing someone. He sighed, even through a mouth covered by a false gas mask, and decided to get it over with. He went down to street level by jumping off the roof.

_WHAM_. _Oh, __**that**__ was subtle_. He was starting to get annoyed at the fact that he cracked the pavement every time he landed on the street, too. Alex, still in the form of the BlackWatch officer, walked right in the front gates to the courtyard.

_I don't need a tank._ Alex thought as he carefully approached the base commander._ I need an APC. And the only thing I see out here is ammunition._ And was there a more…well, was there a quieter way to consume someone without setting off all the base alarms from here to Queens?

_Well…probably. This might work._ He remembered that a glancing punch from him would shut down anyone except for possibly Inky or a tank, but he didn't remember if someone with a broken spine would have time to scream or not. He looked at the crew-cut Marine who paced around the courtyard, hanging onto an assault rifle. It was too bad he was the base commander. _Sorry, but I need to get in there._

Alex grabbed the commander from behind and squeezed until he felt the man's back break, then his body seemed to take over. Even as he absorbed his victim, his disguise was already changing. A second later and he looked exactly like the base commander. The man had even managed to keep hold of his gun after dying. Alex didn't need it, but he held onto the weapon anyway.

He sighed inwardly, reminding himself that this was for the people the military would do their damnedest _not_ to save, and walked over to the door.

It wasn't a whole lot different from the last base he'd been in, aside from the fact that there was more armor in this one and that this time he wasn't being chased by a pack of Hunters. In some small way, that made the entire thing seem kind of…anticlimactic. Alex promptly kicked himself for thinking it.

Now to find someone who knew how to operate an Armored Personnel Carrier. He found himself wondering briefly if the models in the base were M2 Bradleys (and then wondering how he knew that), right up until he managed to find the soldier he was looking for. Just a Marine, nothing special in Alex's opinion, other than the fact that, at some point, he had been taught to drive exactly the vehicle that Alex needed. And because of that, he needed to die.

Alex made sure to give the man the cleanest death he could manage. He broke the Marine's neck using a full-nelson.

"_Welcome to the Marine Armor Training Center. There are nineteen major systems in this Marine Armored Personnel Carrier, and over twenty-five thousand moving parts. In the next eight months, you will learn __**all**__ of them. When you're done here, you'll be able to park that vehicle on top of an enemy position and blow the shit out of them. It's my job to get your shit in order. It's your job to shut the fuck up and learn."_

It wasn't the only memory, but it was the only one that gave Alex a headache. _Well, now that I know how…I can go_. He saw no point in ruthlessly slaughtering the rest of the soldiers in the base. He only needed the APC, not more blood on his hands.

About five minutes later, the nearest group of Marines was wondering why there was an APC driving around the Upper West Side when no one had gotten any word that one would be there. At least it was running Hunters over, though.

* * *

Somewhere else, USMC 1st Force Recon Sergeant Paul Jackson was having a bad day.

It was about to get worse, and though he couldn't have known that for sure, because his gut told him so. After about half a campaign in the Middle East (having been called back to deal with the NYC outbreak and quarantine), he had started to be able to predict when shit was about to go down. Of course, it didn't take a genius to figure out that if your commanding officer was having a bad day, so were you.

For that reason, he avoided the briefing room as well as the water cooler. Lieutenant Vasquez was not in any mood to be interrupted, and Jackson couldn't blame him.

Yesterday had been a bad day. The base nearest the GENTEK building had exploded last night, and the entirety of Vasquez's friend's squad had been killed, along with anyone else who had been inside at the time. Officially, it was caused by a gas leak, but the fact was that their base as well as every other Marine based had gotten contradictory information until right before the explosion.

Jackson remembered that. Though he hadn't been the one in charge of telecommunications—and he honestly couldn't remember who was, since he was simple the group sniper—everyone remembered the frantic call for backup that ended in a scream and a blast of static. The base had already been destroyed by the time anyone had been able to reach the vehicles, shattering every window in a four block radius…damn it, he needed coffee (not alcohol, though that would have been nice. They weren't allowed to drink while on duty). He couldn't get that final scream out of his head.

"Hey!" Jackson looked across the glass-strewn street and spotted a woman, seemingly waving at him. He blinked as she crossed the street, dodging motorists like a freerunner, to bounce right up to him. She missed and ran into the cement of the base's outer wall. "Owowow…"

"Are you all right, miss?" Jackson asked, pulling her to her feet.

"Ow…yeah, I'm okay." She shook her head and tried to run her fingers though her hair, but the curly red mass wouldn't accept it. "Ouch."

"Did you need something?" Jackson asked after she'd forced her hair to behave.

"Not really. I just needed someone to cross the street for. Some crazy costumed freaks have been following me for like three blocks." She looked back nervously at this, trying to spot her pursuers.

"Could you describe them?" Jackson asked. Despite the fact that the Marine Corps' job was mostly to stop the infection at all costs instead of figuring out civilian issues, he didn't mind helping. It was what he had joined the Corps for.

"Um…there were a lot…they were all bloody and disheveled and they were screaming at me…" the woman trailed off, stopping dead. "Ah, _shit_."

"What?" Jackson followed her gaze and spotted a haggard figure stumble around a corner, one arm dragging almost on the ground, and swore rather more viciously. As the figure roared and pounced on a civilian, Jackson grabbed his radio and pushed the redhead inside the gates.

"Eh?! What the hell is—oh my _God_!" She screamed.

Jackson looked up and spotted some hideous, man-shaped animal _thing_ barreling down the street at them. It was huge—taller, faster, and more muscular than anything Jackson had ever seen and he had seen a _lot_—and was flipping _cars_ out of the way. He swore again and saw it actually _bounce_ off a building to catch a fleeing man before it bit his head off. Already gunfire was coming from inside the compound, most of it aimed at the monster that suddenly got up and ran at Jackson and the redhead once again. It didn't even seem hurt by the whole clips of ammo, from a dozen or more rifles.

"Move it!" Jackson barked, pushing the redhead in front of him into the base. He only slowed when the two-foot-thick steel door slammed behind them.

The redhead sank against the door, shaking uncontrollably but not crying. Thankfully, though, she didn't seem to be blubbering incoherently either. She was just scared.

"Listen, miss, I'm going to have to leave you here with Private Johnson." Jackson said sharply, indicating the Marine standing to the left of her. He looked terrified. "I'm going to join the men upstairs."

She shook herself. "All right. I'll stay here," she said, her blue eyes wide.

"Good." Jackson ran up the stairs.

Then came the sound of flesh tearing and something heavy hit the door. There was a noise like steel ripping steel and the door shuddered violently against its bolt and hinges. Pvt. Johnson jumped.

The redhead threw her head back and howled with mad laughter, just as, from above, there came the cry of "Shit, it's Mercer!" She laughed harder.

* * *

**A/N:** Finally, chapter three is done (well, rather, I want to end it here).

Sergeant Paul Jackson—yeah, he's the player character for all of three missions in _Call of Duty: Modern Warfare_. In my personal head-canon, he's still scheduled to get shipped off into the great unknown—_Prototype_ takes place in 2010 at the latest, while Jackson's sent off the unnamed Middle Eastern country in 2011. And anyone who knows how that mission ended, or how the next game's plot works, understands that this is a very bad thing.

In case you were wondering, I'm not actually _sure_ if Jackson is the platoon sniper, but given that the player is _always_ given a sniper rifle at the beginning of a level, I think all the player characters are (well, the ones on the ground, at least).

For reference, Ed sounds like a Kuriboh (from _Yu-Gi-Oh!_).


	4. Playing For Keeps

**Chapter Four: Playing For Keeps**

**A/N:** Okay, here's chapter four, in which there are yet more cameos and the first appearance of Ed's powers.

Also, thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far. And to **Nano**, who reviewed anonymously, Inky is an OC, and that sentence choice was deliberate. Dana "growled" independently of actually trying to talk because, if she hadn't, she would have sounded like Alex.

* * *

**Well, that was fun. I guess Mercer's ex already has him running errands for her.** She smiled to herself at this, remembering that she had made new friends among the Marines while Mercer was off tearing up the city. Sgt. Jackson was nice, which she had never found before in a soldier, and even though Pvt. Johnson was still a little unnerved by her, he _had_ joined them for coffee. It was frankly horrible stuff, but somehow the smell had then attracted Lt. Vasquez and Cpt. "Deadly" Pelayo. They were both equally awesome, and had even offered to have someone escort her home despite the rampant danger, or at least show her to a shelter where the displaced were living. She had refused, though.

It was a pity that Mercer would probably end up killing them all.

She decided to contact her network of minions as she headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge, even as she faded into an alleyway. Her body was always more adaptive in darkness, where she could utilize her abilities fully.

Elizabeth Greene was indeed active. Several of her beasts—Hunters, Mercer had called them—had destroyed entire packs of shadow-hounds that had been snooping around the new Infected structures, called Hives. The woman's mastery of her army was very nearly poetry in motion in the shadow-queen's eyes. It was terribly beautiful. Greene was fighting a war on a dozen fronts and _winning_.

She was fascinated by the idea of a full-scale war with a worthy opponent such as the American military—clearly Greene was malevolent _and_ intelligent—but she found herself wondering at her rival's motives. There hadn't been anything left in the woman's eyes except for a single-minded intent to kill. To kill, to infect, to control. The shadow-queen sighed. **Well, not much left to negotiate with.**

She couldn't use the same tactic as Greene anyway, not with her devastating weakness to sunlight. Maybe Mercer could, if he had the right reason to and a psyche that was slightly less human, but she doubted that he would ever pursue Greene's goals, whatever they were. Though he and Greene seemed to be cut from the same cloth, the apple had not only fallen far from the tree, it had rolled down the hill and off a cliff.

Admittedly, she had only Greene's ambiguous comment (and a few guesses as to why Mercer seemed to set off every virus detector within eighty meters) to go on, but it seemed like a decent theory at the moment. Anyway, she'd give Mercer a bit of time to fight his own battles. There were some things the shadow-queen was just flat-out _incapable_ of pulling off despite her powers and flattening an entire brigade in five minutes in broad daylight was one of them.

There was a pause. Then she abruptly remembered her many, many duties as self-declared ally of Alex Mercer. Namely, actually acting like one. **Oh, shit. Forgot. This'll take **_**forever**_**…**

* * *

It was hard to tell if Karen had been unnerved by the speed in which he'd managed to steal an APC, but they decided not to discuss it. Even if he knew how, the muscle memory wasn't fully developed yet and, as a result, he tended to run over overturned cars and sometimes even Hunters whenever he wasn't paying attention. After the first couple of times that had happened, Karen had just shaken her head and stopped talking.

Still, Alex managed to drive her all the way to her East Harlem lab with minimal casualties and relatively little property damage.

While she went inside, he dropped the vehicle off in a hot zone and left it for whatever Marines cared to pick it up for the massive machine gun on the roof. With Karen safe inside a building with walls so thick dynamite couldn't damage it, he certainly didn't need it anymore.

When Alex came back, she was already going over files on her laptop with the same nigh-religious attention that Dana had. For a moment, he wondered if he should tell her that he was _right here, thank you_, but she turned around before he had been waiting for more than a few seconds.

"We know a few things about the outbreak." Karen said, almost to herself. "There are two genetic strains at work."

_Two? Oh no…_

"I need samples from both types to be able to treat it. You'll need to locate samples from Infected water towers and then collect samples from a full-blown Hive." She gestured to a map on her computer screen and Alex recognized most of the hot zones highlighted from the map on Dana's safe house wall. "The water towers are prevalent in these areas. Get there, destroy them, and collect the material, then head uptown and get the material from the Hive."

She brought up yet another screen. "From what I can tell, most of the water towers will spawn fully-grown Hunters, much like Hives do. If anything gets too close, they hatch and start attacking. If you can destroy them before then, you'll probably have an easier time."

He agreed, but wasn't willing to leave it as just that. "Whatever's happening here," Alex warned her, "this is only the beginning." And he knew it was true—whatever else was going on, Greene was free and even without her army of Infected, she was at least as strong as he was. That alone was enough for concern.

Karen smiled faintly and nodded. "I know. But hopefully we can still stop it."

* * *

Dana had woken up at about noon and had spent most of the hours since then going over the files on the computer. It wasn't like there was much else to do, not with Ed growling at her every time she even thought of going to the front door and the news reports saying that a zombie apocalypse had started. She didn't have a gun anyway and as far as she could tell, the plague hadn't spread to her apartment complex yet. Besides that—and this was the most important thing—Alex had told her to stay put in case the military was after her, too. Since her initial encounter with BlackWatch, she was inclined to listen to him.

"This sucks." Dana said to Ed, who sat on one side of the screen. He crunched the can of cat food she'd given him and started to clean his antennae, like a cat washing its face.

Dana sighed. Ed wasn't much of a conversation partner. Then again, that cat that had apparently once lived here? It probably wasn't much of a talker either. She was starting to remember why she'd never wanted a pet.

_Bing_! She jumped and looked at the screen. She hadn't just heard that, had she? _Click_. She brought up the little obnoxious icon in the corner that indicated that an internet chatroom was open.

**Shadowgurl11:** Hey Dana! You there?

What. The. Fuck. "Who in hell is—?" Dana started to say, but she was cut off by another _bing_.

**Shadowgurl11: **It's Inky, duh.

**MissionCtrl: **How the fuck did you do that?

**Shadowgurl11: **Do what?

**MissionCtrl:** Never mind. Where are you?

**Shadowgurl11:** Queens.

**MissionCtrl:** …wait.

**MissionCtrl:** WHAT.

**Shadowgurl11:** QUEENS.

**MissionCtrl:** How the fuck did you get across the Brooklyn Bridge? There's a military barricade on it! WITH TANKS.

**Shadowgurl11:** Your point is? I'm Inky. I do this sort of thing for a living.

**MissionCtrl: **…

**Shadowgurl11:** Anyway, I'm hanging out with this delivery—sorry, _bike messenger_—guy and he helped me find a library with decent Wi-Fi and I think he's got LIGHTNING POWERS and—what do you _mean_ you don't?—his girlfriend is this scientist—okay, _doctor_—lady and I'm going to go shopping soon, so what do you need?

Dana stared. Her mind was still slightly behind events, stuck on the sheer ridiculousness of what she'd just read, so she responded slowly. Apparently, it was too slow for Inky, who seemed to be high on a combination of caffeine and speed.

**Shadowgurl11:** And buzzboy's girlfriend isn't going to let me buy stupid things for you anyway.

**MissionCtrl:** …If you can find, cat food, milk, canned soup, and cereal, that'd be nice. I think rationing is starting over here.

**Shadowgurl11:** OK! And give me your size so I can get you some new clothes. Trish will help!

**MissionCtrl:** …Medium on shirts, size two in most jeans, that kind of thing.

**Shadowgurl11:** Got it! See you in a day or two!

* * *

Collecting genetic material. She'd said it like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Long story short, it wasn't. First, Alex had to find a water tower that was incubating a Hunter. That was actually an easy enough thing to do—after all, crows tended to circle overhead, waiting for something to drop dead so they could descend and feast.

_That_ wasn't really the problem. Finding a tower was the easy part. The problem was the _other_ Infected that surrounded it. Once the Hunter inside the tower was disturbed, it tended to die, but the mid-level human Infected would invariably try to kill him as soon as he approached. It necessitated a lot of slashing on his part, which would inevitably slow him down long enough for some_ dumbass_ to call a strike team.

Then he'd spend the next five minutes or so trying to kill a helicopter with rooftop air conditioners and by the time he was done, someone _else_ would call _another_ one in, and that would be the pattern for almost an hour, or until he managed to hide for long enough that they assumed he wasn't in the area anymore.

Next tower, repeat pattern.

Stabbing the premature Hunters' bodies with syringes for their blood was a hell of a lot easier than _killing the fucking strike teams_. Were it not for them, he wouldn't have even cared if a dozen hulking Infected had declared him their unofficial punching bag. Hell, he'd rather go up against three fully-functional Hunters at once than _yet another_ minigun-equipped Apache Longbow. If only for some variety.

Still, that was three filled syringes. Now it was just a matter of finding a Hive…

He looked down from his current rooftop perch, all the way down to street level where, of course, the military was mounting an assault on a Hive. _Not again…_ Alex groaned mentally. But then, some things needed to be done. He had no idea how long it would take him to find another Hive barely a day after Greene's escape, and if he waited until a more convenient one appeared, it might be too late to stop the virus. This would have to be the one, despite the tanks.

Alex just sighed inwardly and leapt off. In midair, his arms morphed into claws again and he hit the ground slashing. Three Infected civilians died in the instant after his landing, one crushed and two torn in half.

He backhanded another and tore its head from its shoulders as he ran up to the Hive's outer walls. He could already see the mid-sized Infected drones spawning from the red patches on the concrete. Alex narrowed his eyes and jumped, twisting in midair to land on a car just as a Hunter—the first real Hunter he had seen all day—tried to bring its fists down on his head. Then he reached down and grabbed the frame and again spun in midair.

The taxi crashed into the Hunter's torso and it went down gurgling. _Okay, what next?_

Alex ran his claws down one of the red blobs, ripping it wide open. The Infected inside—another of the ones the size of a football player on _serious_ steroids—flopped out onto the red-stained cement, unmoving. _Well, well, well. I guess they can't come out early at all._ He shifted one arm back to normal and swung wide with the other, splitting the skull of the Infected civilian that had been charging at him. Then he drew blood from the one lying at his feet.

_That should be almost enough…_ Alex turned at the sound of tank treads and caught a 5.56x45mm NATO round in the sternum. Oddly enough, it didn't hurt. It didn't even punch through the bone. Alex looked down and absentmindedly fingered the bullet hole, then looked up at the hapless soldier who was continuing to fire on him.

One swing of his claws split the Marine's legs from his torso.

Alex didn't think past that point, not with the two tanks on the block choosing that moment to open fire. He was running entirely on what reflexes he had trained into himself over the last few days. Then there were the Hunters, descending from the building in ever-greater numbers. After his first encounter with them not too long ago, he was getting better and better at avoiding the dreaded mob attack. As an RPG exploded against his back and the shrapnel seared his flesh, though, he reflected bitterly that he couldn't fight a war on two fronts. _Not yet_.

He picked up some ancient sedan and tossed it in the general direction of the nearest tank, then went after the other one. He understood enough about armor to know that the greatest threat to mechanized cavalry was infantry. Tanks couldn't fire effectively at close range, and the M1 Abrams that were following him around like angry pit bulls couldn't afford to use anything larger than their machine gun if he was too close to an allied vehicle. Everything on the Abrams aside from the machine guns (and canister rounds, admittedly, but Alex wasn't worried about those) was designed to kill other tanks, and it was practically carved into the minds of most soldiers that friendly fire was a Bad Thing.

_Of course_, he thought as the soldiers all around him were cut down by a sudden spray of what was essentially a shotgun round built for a tank, _BlackWatch would be an exception to that_.

Still, other than leaping inside the hatch of the tank—which he didn't think he had enough time to do—he could, at best, scratch the paint off and try breaking the treads. His claws had hardly made a dent in the Hunters before, so how could they possibly get past heavy armor?

Alex ducked behind a Hunter, which stupidly stared at the place he had been for long enough that it caught a face full of RPG-7. _Okay, what the hell am I doing?_ Then he felt his arms throb again and blinked. _Maybe…_

This would be tricky. He hardly knew _how_ he had first pulled off a weapon transformation, only that it had happened immediately after he had fought, defeated, and consumed his first Hunter. There had been a sudden surge of…something… Almost out of reflex, Alex grabbed the nearest mid-sized Infected and tore its throat out with one set of claws. This time he forced the tendrils out, and they fed off it—_he_ fed off it.

There was another throb, but this one went all the way up his back and into his shoulders. Then he knew what he was doing.

It was all rather simple, really. He needed the ability to beat a tank into submission. It just so happened that he couldn't do it with claws because there wasn't enough power behind them. Well, there would be plenty of power once he had enough mass. And to gain more mass, he needed to consume everything on the block that was not a tank or a normal human.

It didn't take long. Alex wasn't any slower despite the fact that now his weight could stall a car, and he ran up to the nearest tank from behind. He shifted his arms back to normal and concentrated until he felt a deliberate throb of his mass shifting, then swung.

Then there came the sound of metal groaning and denting under the weight and power of the club-like black limb. He swung again with his other heavy, heavy arm, collapsing the rear of the chassis and twisting the treads outward. Soon enough, something would catch fire.

Alex Mercer smirked and went for the second one, stopping only to flip a Lexus up into a nearby attack helicopter. Now he had a way to fight armor.

Two destroyed tanks and dozens of dead Infected later, Alex returned to the Hive with an "abandoned" recoilless rifle. Okay, now he had to finish up collecting the samples. It would just be a lot easier if he flattened the building first.

* * *

**Is everyone being good? **A chorus of yips, barks, trills, and one deep-throated roar sprang up in her mind. The shadow-queen smiled to herself and found a waterfront view on the riverside park. She couldn't be bothered to find a better spot to observe the besieged island across the way, but she supposed it didn't matter.

She'd seen two or three groups of tanks and other armored vehicles cross the bridge since she'd arrived. It had been interesting, to say the least, but ultimately it didn't matter much. She was constantly getting reports from her minions in the city, and all of them were saying that the Infected were far from easy targets. Sure, they died in droves, but they had an uncanny ability to increase their numbers.

What had "official sources" said before? She wracked her brains for old statistics about a virus she hadn't cared about much at the time, and came up with something like "99.99 percent fatality rate." Well, that couldn't be right. If that was true, there would only be approximately one hundred thousand Infected running around Manhattan, and no civilians.

Something went funny somewhere, and she was sure Greene was somehow behind most of it. Damn it, if only she could remember what she'd heard years ago, it would have been easy! **If only, if only…**

The shadow-queen sighed. Almost idly, she waved for her flunkies to tail McMullen and General Randall in case anything new came up. As an afterthought, she also ordered one—another mini-nightwing, but not quite as smart as Bat—to track down Mercer. With Ed looking after Dana, one of her bats looking for Mercer, and two separate sets of shadow-hounds following the conspirators, she had most things covered.

**It's not like it's hard to figure out what's going on now. **She said to herself. **BlackWatch's command post is in Battery Park, GENTEK is in the middle of town as far as I'm concerned…what am I missing? General Randall is already in town if Bat is anything to go by, and there—oh, is McMullen even in the city yet? Anyone?**

She didn't get an answer for that question, but she was abruptly sidetracked anyway. At that moment, Bat did something that was very unusual. It called out to her. **Hm? What is it, my little minion?**

Bat gave a sort of mental shrug and projected an image into her mind. The shadow-queen paused, digesting it.

**Sometimes I **_**really**_** hate having idiots for pets.** She paused, thinking.** Did I ever even tell Mercer that GENTEK was a front for BlackWatch? No? Shit, not **_**again**_**. Now I have to go back _early_.**

* * *

Sometime later, Alex balanced on the edge of a rooftop overlooking Battery Park. It hadn't been planned—hell, he'd been on the way back to Karen's lab—but something about the place had distracted him. It most likely had something to do with the sheer number of BlackWatch troopers going in, out, and around the massive compound. If not that, the security detail—which included _tanks_ (_For Pete's sake, they called that subtle?_ Alex thought.)—would have tipped off anything with a rudimentary brain.

_Shit, this is a fortress._ He had no idea how he was supposed to get in. All he had was an idea—a face that came to him in a memory and did nothing else—and his strange abilities. _Well, I've done something like this before_.

He didn't even have a _reason_ to risk horrible dismemberment by going inside, aside from his burning need to know what the hell was going on. At the center of everything seemed to be one Raymond McMullen, his old boss, and if nothing else, finding the man would get Alex the answers he craved. He _knew_ it was stupid and dangerous to be this obsessed over his missing memories when he had Dana to look after, but that didn't change the fact that he _had_ to find out. _Anything_ to fill the aching void in his mind. _**Someone**__ here knows McMullen. And they're going to tell me everything they know._

Without really even thinking about it, he started down from the rooftop while transforming into one of the BlackWatch soldiers he had recently killed. After everything that had happened recently, it wasn't even something he needed to concentrate on.

He landed just out of sight of the nearest guard, cracking the pavement just as a helicopter passed overhead, masking the sound. After that, it was just a matter of walking up to the compound and slipping in.

_Jesus Christ, this place is bigger than I thought_. Alex ducked around most of the soldiers, not interested in starting a fight in a hundred men's' crosshairs despite the fact that he would most likely survive. There was a certain level of insanity he wouldn't _start_, but he _would_ finish, make no mistake.

He passed several soldiers—not BlackWatch, but Marines, and slowed a little. _Do they use this place as a training facility? BlackWatch is supposed to be the best of the best or whatever…_ If they were trying to show the Marines how to deal with Infected, Alex almost had to laugh. He'd killed nearly twice as many BlackWatch soldiers compared to Marines, and that was just because they were too stubborn to run when he was in the middle of fighting something else. The Marines were starting to learn that it wasn't a good idea to get between him and a Hunter, and dutifully stood back to shoot while BlackWatch marched right on in and got decapitated or dismembered by the truckloads. Irony, then.

Shaking his head, Alex started to jog toward the main building, noticing that the soldiers seemed jumpy today. He wasn't sure _why_ exactly, but figured it had something to do with him. He only had to watch the way the soldiers moved for a while before he figured out the pattern. He couldn't hear the orders being given, but everyone seemed to move out from one man's position near the far wall of the compound. That man was a BlackWatch officer, dressed in white unlike the shock troops' black, though Alex couldn't be bothered to figure out his rank. _He's in charge. He's the one I want._

There were dozens of soldiers around still, but suddenly it didn't matter much. Alex walked up to the base commander with a level of casual ease that would have been utterly alien to anyone who knew the man he pretended to be, completely certain of what he needed to do. He followed the man into the corner of the base, then—

Alex had used this technique once before on a Marine base commander, but this time there was absolutely no feeling of regret. He, for lack of a better term, "crunched" his target. He wasn't at all surprised then the memory flared in his mind and momentarily stunned him.

"_We know that ZEUS has been spotted multiple times in this area and we're breaking out some new tech to pin him down. This Unmanned Aerial Vehicle can detect the virus at less than ten parts per million in open air. With it, we should be able to box ZEUS in and destroy it._"

Alone, it might not have meant much. After all, Alex had already demonstrated his ability to outrun everything short of a (_thrice-damned-by-everything_) Apache, so it wasn't as if they actually had a chance in keeping him stuck in one spot for very long. He was already starting to pick up the patterns of his own transformations faster than they could come up with new ways to kill him. All in all, it wasn't much of a threat to him personally, or to Inky (who Alex _still_ wasn't sure could be hurt by gunfire).

But with the UAVs, they could find out where he'd been. They'd find Dana, and Alex would _not_ allow that to happen. Not after the first time that had happened.

_Okay, first things first. Time to get the hell out of here_. Alex broke into a run, not caring if anyone commented, freaked out, or started shooting. If he played this the wrong way, Dana would be dead before he managed to get out of here if he tried acting normally. Problems on top of problems, threats on top of threats…he was starting to really, _really_ hate BlackWatch.

Alex leapt over the concrete wall and sprinted into a park before he even thought about slowing down. He only stopped and removed his disguise when he realized that, if the military planned on boxing him in, he couldn't allow them to go on patrol _at all_ or else they might find Dana instead and kill her. He would have to play the bait. Clenching one fist and seeing the tendrils of black and red run up and down his arm, just to see that his abilities remained at the ready, Alex turned and ran for the nearest building. He needed a vantage point.

He shot up the side, scaring several groups of civilians he couldn't be bothered to care much about, and climbed the last few feet onto the roof. Thankfully, no one with any actual authority seemed to have noticed, or else Apaches would already be on the way. He couldn't hear any chopper blades yet, which gave him something like five minutes before he ought to be worried.

Alex looked down, watching as the first of several tanks began to roll out from the base, and tried to think of something. He could destroy one tank, possibly two, if there were actual _distractions_ around. Without a convenient Hive or something else for the military to shoot at instead of him, he was in for a dangerously lengthy fight. Unless…

Alex almost grinned to himself. _Kill tanks with tanks_. If they could take down Hunters, who he _knew_ could be tough bastards from his own fights with them, he wouldn't be surprised if the only timely way to kill an M1 Abrams was to shoot it with another one.

At least he had a plan now. Alex picked a different disguise this time—that of a Marine he had killed on the second day he could remember—and dropped out of sight, away from the patrols. He'd need to approach this group differently. With his luck, horrible as it was, the UAVs could see right through his disguise and point him out to the gunners. In that case, he'd just have to be quick.

It was possible that the last thing the patrol had been expecting was a one-man charge, straight at the lead tank. About two seconds later, though, as the camouflage-clad soldier vaulted on top of the first Abrams and ripped the hatch off, they realized their hesitation was the worst mistake they could have ever made. Then the man dropped inside.

Alex didn't think. He reacted—as soon as the crew started to draw their weapons, he lashed out viciously, splattering the four of them all across the inside of the tank until the blood splashed up out of the hole where the hatch had been.

He also didn't have to think as his arms twisted into impossible shapes again to allow him to take control of four different battle stations. All he had to do was figure out where to fire. The turret swiveled and suddenly depleted uranium rounds were flying through the air. Alex tightened his grip on the controls (he…didn't want to think about the nature of his fingers at the moment) and almost laughed, because _now_ he had a way to fight. And he never _would_ run out of tricks, thanks to them.

Almost idly, he shot down the annoying, hovering UAV pair before moving on to the rest of the convoy. At least the squealing things couldn't attack.

He went on to destroy two whole patrols before he accidentally ran through a Hive-affected zone and a Hunter got in a lucky shot, destroying the already-damaged treads. _Shit, shit, shit!_ _There is no way in hell I'm getting bogged down __**here**__!_ Alex fought his way past the mid-level Infected who barred his way out of the disabled tank, slashing wildly with his claws and shredding a dozen or so, before he ran into the second major snag in his plan.

_Yet_ _another_ fucking flight of Apache Longbows. Okay, regardless of anything they had ever done to someone who was not him, he _hated_ BlackWatch now. There was just no reason they could afford to waste half of the choppers in the _entire fucking city_ on him while their men were being attacked from fifty different directions at _every single Hive_. _This is just fucking unbelievable!_

As he hefted a taxi on one hand and flung toward the lead chopper, he reflected that it wasn't the _worst_ possible outcome, just pretty high on the list. At least there weren't any Hunters—he'd managed to escape the affected zone. And, given how durable his body had proven so far, he wasn't so worried about being killed, at least. He just hoped that he'd be fast enough to take out every one of the patrols. Or else loud enough to take them off Dana's trail. Either outcome would be fine with him.

Besides, there was a certain black humor to how BlackWatch reacted to one of their own vehicles turning on its fellows—namely, they didn't. Maybe backstabbing was just ridiculously common there, but Alex filed the information away for later. It _could_ be useful.

"_We burn our own to hold the Red Line"…yes, __**now**__ you will._

* * *

_BOOM. BOOM. GATTAGATTAGATTAGATTA—BOOM! SCREEEEE—BOOM!_

Dana almost fell out of her chair in shock. What the _hell_ was wrong with the world today?! First there was whatever had exploded at that military base two nights ago, and now this! Only this wasn't a fuel-to-air explosion, like last time. These explosions, the sound of screaming metal…they weren't accidental. It sounded like urban warfare.

Dana ducked behind a table as another blast rocked the apartment and Ed, along with the can of cat food he had been stalking, fell off the table. She heard the plaster start to crack as Ed collapsed into a little puddle and started to wail. It only lasted a second, though, before he grabbed the cat food again.

"Ed, get over here!" Dana hissed at the little black monster, who had paused to swallow his food whole. Then he slunk over to her knees like a scolded puppy, if puppies were made of liquid blackness, and dropped his big head on her thigh. Dana barely avoided growling. "Stupid little…"

Then the apartment shook again and Dana forgot what she was going to say in favor of ducking as plaster and bits of wall showered over them both. She could hear the sounds of gunfire getting closer, even through the brick. "What the hell is going on?"

Ed latched onto the table leg with his huge jaws, still somehow managing to screech with his mouth full. A second later, Dana covered her head as the little creature's body melted into a puddle that almost instantly rose all around her like a cage. She barely managed to keep from panicking.

"Ed?!" But he ignored her and the cage bars widened until almost no light crept through and, as the blasts from outside grew louder, Dana suddenly realized what he was doing. He was _protecting_ her. "Please, get the laptop!" _We can't afford to lose it_.

Ed growled, but about ten seconds later, the laptop appeared, unharmed, within the black bubble of safety. Dana grabbed it and settled back, trying to think as the walls continued to rattle and Ed kept up his high-pitched growl.

Ed was a lot smarter than Inky had suggested. But she had said he was strong enough to make sure she'd be safe, no matter who or what came after her or Alex…Dana gave a shuddering laugh. _God, this is __**insane**_. _My big brother's the military's number one priority, I'm friends with a woman who deals in shadows that __**think**__, and now everyone's fighting in the streets with tanks and helicopters? Did I make a mistake and turn off the exit that said "Twilight Zone"? _But_…It's thanks to them, all three of them, that I'm still alive._

"Thanks, Ed." Dana murmured, patting his head. "For…looking after me."

Ed purred. He also drooled, and Dana just had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it.

* * *

**A/N: **My version of Alex sure does a lot of complaining, doesn't he? :P He's such a whiner. BUT THERE WAS NO ANGST. YAY. Just Nathan Drake-esque mental ranting.

The bike messenger? Cole McGrath. Yes, that guy from _inFAMOUS_. It's kind of obvious the Ray Sphere hasn't gone off yet…so no lightning powers. Not yet.

Also, I'm completely making up the parts where Alex is controlling a tank, and where he is gathering genetic material from the water towers. There is, frankly, no in-game explanation for those mechanics, so I had to make one.


	5. Universal Truths

**Chapter Five: Universal Truths**

**A/N: **Chapter five ahoy! And before anyone asks, I have pretty much everything written up until about the middle of the game. Then things get complicated.

Thanks to those who reviewed last chapter! I hope I got to respond properly to your reviews…

To **Nano**, you might say that Inky's not just two-faced. She's rather more…triple-faced. :3 Also, Alex has the standard running monologue of a New Yorker on a bad day. He drops the F-bomb as if they were commas.

Has anyone else noticed that Captain Cross is like Batman? But less _awesome_ and more manipulative?

Also, I know I'm a bit late (for a given value of "on time," admittedly). This site doesn't like my files much, it seems.

* * *

_**GO TO HELL, YOU MISERABLE EXCUSE FOR A MOTHERFU—HEY! DON'T THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY FROM ME!**_

Occasionally, it felt really, really good to be able to shred subterranean Infected with impunity. It was like being in a videogame. Despite the massive cathartic effect of slaughtering the mindless beasts, though, she felt that it was somehow cheating that Greene always seemed to have still more of the slow, incredibly hostile creatures running around. It was like playing _Space Invaders_, except instead of being just one ship facing an invasion, she could command practically the entire sewer system to rise up and eat her opponents. So, really, they were both cheating.

They were a very interesting way to experiment, though. Since discovering Greene's earlier pet projects—Hunters and Walkers, specifically—the shadow-queen had been developing exponentially more powerful monsters of her own to counteract them. Admittedly, she had gone through several revisions and had even showed Cole a (badly-drawn) sketch regarding possible designs and had had to scrap about a dozen of them. The failed experiments she had called "shadow-dancers" could only fight Walkers, being too fragile for anything more vicious, and so she had demoted the chosen minions back to shadow-hounds until she could find a more effective form to give them.

**Okay, you. **She waved a hand and a small, squeaky creature appeared in front of her. **Consider yourself volunteered.**

The little being nodded the lump that apparently was its head and began to change shape. It inflated like a balloon even in the darkness, and the shadow-queen waved her clawed hand again for it to continue. It continued to inflate, expanding to the point that it began to crowd out its fellows and absorb them into its still-growing body.

**Stop there.** She grabbed its barely-defined jaws and pulled them apart until its mouth could open nearly one hundred and eighty degrees. Then she began shaping three rows of inky-black teeth that would catch and hold prey. Glancing back at its stumpy body, the shadow-queen just shrugged. **You are going to be one **_**slow**_** bastard. So, to catch anything…** Pressing her thumbs into its head and creating eye sockets further back in its head, she then concentrating on the tongue. Specifically, she grabbed one end and stretched it. **You must be a chameleon-alligator-hippo-thingy!**

She stood back and admired her work. True, the creature was mostly jaws and teeth without a whole lot of mobility built into the design, but the tongue made it her first long-range creation. She wasn't sure what it could catch yet—Hunters? Walkers? Helicopters and tanks?—but it seemed like a success in _some_ direction, at least. **"And the shadow-queen saw it, and saw it was good." So, I think I'll need a few more of this kind. Everyone knows how to do it, right? Remember, the ratio is sixteen to one, and stop at about twenty-four.**

The horde gave a chirpy chorus. **Good. Make sure one of them is always surrounded by at least two shadow-hounds and a swarm of nightwings.** She looked at the first of her biggest soldiers. **And your name, and the name of your kind…I'll call you "Big Gulps."**

In a taxi not too far away, the shadow-queen's physical body woke up from a nap and she said, "Okay, you can drop me off here. And keep the change!" **Hey, you can see the Big Applesauce from here.** She made sure to grab her shopping bags from the trunk before walking off.

She yawned and stretched, briefly stopping underneath a tree as the sun began to set. She tapped her shoes back into place and started the long, boring walk to Dana's safe house. The shadow-queen's mind, though, was buzzing with new ideas. **How many of these will I end up needing? Ed?**

Ed, from nearly halfway across the island, sent a series of impressions back to her. **Ah…I see. Never mind about me, then. What exactly happened?**

There was an image in her mind now, so powerful that the shadow-queen stopped and blinked from the recoil of it. Steel and concrete exploding into the air, tanks and helicopters and men all being tossed around by either Mercer or the Infected, jets streaking overhead and dropping cluster bombs onto Hives for lack of ammunition, flying blood or bone splattered everywhere…and, above all in Ed's mind, there was Dana. The fighting must have been dangerously close to her safe house. She was scared, and, for all her pretenses of flippancy and benign neglect of her duty to her allies, the shadow-queen felt a brief twinge of regret. Dana hadn't asked for this, but, by virtue of being on Mercer's side, she was an automatic target to the other two. Granted, the shadow-queen wasn't sure if BlackWatch was searching for Dana at all, or if she was the reason why Greene seemed to be aggressively expanding her controlled areas, but it never hurt to be careful. **But all I can do is provide bodyguards. I don't like the idea of keeping someone like her out of the loop for too long—remember what happened back then, Ed? We almost won, but in the end all those secrets were coming out to get us. And we lost almost everything.** There was another twinge of regret there, as the shadow-queen automatically tried to bring up another memory—**No! I am **_**not**_** going to think about that!** She berated herself almost instantly,** Keep your head in the game, girl! We don't have the time for this…**

Ed seemed to sigh in agreement.

**McMullen's already running around with Randall and BlackWatch (and I owe Bismarck and Chekov apologies for ignoring them for a few hours while they were trying to tell me about it) and besides telling Mercer that, I don't know what to do…Jesus, this is getting more and more complicated. Anyway, Ed. What's changed in the last couple of days? **Then she added as an afterthought,** Besides the fact that Mercer's **_**still**_** working for his ex, of course.**

Ed paused and she felt him try to go over his most recent, most distinct memories. She got the strong impression that Ed hadn't left the apartment once in the time she'd been gone, which was good, but he had kept in contact with most of the other minions in the area. What he reported startled her.

**Virus detectors? They countered Mercer so quickly! It's like they were waiting for him…** In fact…they probably were, to some degree. She had barely glanced at the file labeled "OPERATION REDLIGHT" when Bat had brought it up in her mind, or the folder that had been called "OPERATION FIREBREAK" in big, alarming red font. The shadow-queen immediately regretted it. She'd really dropped the ball on this one. **Well, **_**shit**_**. Bat, I want those files. Get them by any means possible. And…see if you can find anything labeled like this**—and she projected the letters composing the words "OPERATION ALTRUISTIC"—** On the double, minions!**

The horde screeched happily, overjoyed to have something to do again, while the shadow-queen approached the edge of the military barricade and leaned against a nearby building. Now she just needed to wait for sunset so her powers would be at their peak. Four hours. But if she had to act before then…well, she could always project her armor to a suitable underground location. Granted, it wouldn't last long if she wasn't careful, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

She looked at the smoke rising from the skyline above Manhattan and stared hard, calling for her spare servants to obey her commands directly. **Just what are you up to, Alex Mercer?**

* * *

The phrase "This is getting ridiculous" did not even begin to cover what Alex was feeling at the moment. Not only was he tired in a way he couldn't quite describe without a dictionary, trying to avoid thinking about the sheer number of people he must have killed _by accident_ within the last two days he'd been running around, and feeling like he'd been hit in the face by a cement block (and he probably had), now there were even more obstacles on the horizon. It was _just not __**fair**_. Damn it, he didn't kill innocent people on purpose, as far as he could tell he wasn't contagious, and all he really wanted was to know _what the fuck was going on_. BlackWatch, in his opinion, should have saved its self-righteous campaign against him for someone who was _actively_ trying to murder them all from the bottom up—namely, Elizabeth Greene. At least then they would have made some actual _progress_.

But shaking a fist at the sky wasn't going to get anything done. It seemed like BlackWatch had set up a new project while he had been distracted. And this one was just as bad as the first.

He'd spent the night (or at least several hours of it) in a secluded area far out of the way of any Hives or military patrols of any sort, just trying to take a break for a while. But it hadn't worked out that way. He hadn't noticed when BlackWatch had started setting up stationary virus detectors before nightfall—and even if he had, he probably wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, given how busy he'd been—but they represented a much more serious problem now. Now there were no mobile units to destroy, only dug-in BlackWatch troopers who would be expecting him and shoot at anything that tripped their sensors.

In the hazy, smoke-dampened morning light, Alex turned his head slightly to the side and glanced in the direction of the nearest one. Their basic strategy was a little different after a day of losing units to him, though. While previously they had expected to catch him in the open, unaware that they were combing the city for him, now they acted like they were preparing for a siege. This, unfortunately, meant that he would have to bring the fight to them yet again.

Well, this was just fine with him. When it came to BlackWatch, he couldn't even respect their skills or training, or their motivations. All he saw were monsters, all as bad as or worse than he was—and he knew that once this was over, if it ever was, he would have nightmares for years if he ever slept again. Once the anger wore off, then every other emotion he had been blocking out would drop onto his head like a block of depleted uranium.

But until then, he had things to do.

Alex concentrated and took the form of a BlackWatch officer, then ran up the side of the first building. Already the alarm had begun to wail.

Alex didn't really think whenever he got in a fight with anything. It didn't matter whether his newest enemy was a tank, a Hunter, a slew of weaker Infected, a helicopter, a random soldier, or whatever else the world could throw at him. When he fought, any pretense of calm, cold calculation was tossed away and body parts ended up everywhere whether he wanted to kill everyone or not.

And he wasn't _really_ aware of any of it. Except that, when he looked back over what he'd done over a given day, he could remember killing any number of people. There was just no emotion attached to those memories. Just another day in his life, after all. It felt almost like a dream.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, where memories and emotions lay whenever he wasn't with Dana, he was horrified by the incredible detachment he felt whenever he butchered an entire platoon without taking any serious injury. But every time that feeling wanted to make itself known, it was swamped by an endless tide of paranoia- and pragmatism-based justifications. _"Kill or be killed." "Don't stop or it'll all be over."_ Over and over, going on forever…

"HEY, MERCER!!" Alex jerked out of his blind battle-rage, completing his vicious thrashing of the still-squealing virus detector (this wasn't the first one…wait, how many of them had he already destroyed?) only because his cudgel of an arm had too much momentum behind it. As the siren finally cut off, he turned and spotted a darker-than-usual patch of shadow hiding behind a rooftop vent. As he watched it, the patch twitched and wiggled, eventually forming a very good approximation of what Ed would look like if he was about a foot taller.

"Inky?" he asked the little creature, which, as he kept his eyes on it, began to stretch and distort into something like a dog. Broadly. Most dogs that he knew of tended not to be pitch-black with glowing blue eyes and badly-defined bodies. This one seemed to have a tail made of smoke, which was just the cherry on the weirdness dessert.

"Not quite. I decided to borrow Kafka—this shadow-hound—so I could get a look at what you were up to." The shadow-hound sat down in the shade and Alex saw it give a yawn that made its head look like a bear trap with eyes. "It's a mouthpiece for now."

Alex wasn't sure whether to groan or just nod like he actually understood what was going on. Whenever Inky appeared, the world took a turn for the weird, but at least she hadn't tried to kill him before. "Okay, so…?"

"Well, one thing—I sort of left my physical body behind in a hospital waiting room, so I don't have quite enough control to help you fight off helicopters or anything," the creature explained, using Inky's voice. It was getting to be more than a little disconcerting. Alex sighed and took cover from the nigh-omnipresent helicopters that chose that moment to swoop overhead. _Missed us by __**that**__ much..._

"I don't see why you want to help me now. It's not like you've done much to help me since fighting Greene." Alex retorted, putting the issue of frantically destroying every virus detector out of his mind for a moment.

"Hey, I have guards posted all around Dana's apartment." Inky's voice protested. The shadow-hound seemed to be nothing more than a convenient projector for her, given that it didn't seem to be doing anything relevant. "_And_ I have more information for you."

"Really." Alex couldn't deny that he was interested now, but damned if he would let her know it.

The shadow-hound held up a claw-tipped forelimb as Inky spoke. "One—McMullen's planning on leaving BlackWatch headquarters by helicopter." Alex blinked. _Wait, when did McMullen __**get**__ there? What hasn't she been telling me? _Inky went on, "I don't know exactly when or where, since no one's mentioned anything yet. But he _will_ have to leave eventually, and I'll let you know a tentative date when I have one. Two—something serious is going down in Battery Park, BlackWatch's RED CROWN command center. Maybe it's just McMullen's presence and GENTEK throwing its weight around, or maybe not.

"And, most important to the general population, three—Elizabeth Greene isn't just spreading the virus and the Infected. She's _mobilizing_ them." The Inky-possessed shadow-hound began to change shape into something entirely different. After several moments wherein it seemed to have reduced itself to something like a smear on the ground, it sprang up like a weed. Now there was a little black tentacle, which split into three at its tip, where the hound had been. "See this? Whatever Greene's been trying to create, it's shaped like this. But imagine it about forty to fifty feet long and prone to picking up things to throw at people."

"How am I supposed to fight something like that?" _As_ _if the Hunters weren't enough…_

Inky's shadow-hound reformed and it seemed to shrug. "I've been coming up with new minions to counter them, but until I have enough and figure out where to use them, you're stuck. Granted, it seems like Greene isn't finished with these triple-headed suckers because she hasn't used them against you or anyone else yet, but it's a taste of what she has in store for Manhattan."

"That doesn't help me much." Alex replied. "But thanks anyway. I guess it's better than going in blind."

"Glad to help." Inky told him. "So, what exactly are you up to?"

"Destroying virus detectors." Alex said, standing up straight. It'd been long enough—if he waited any longer, BlackWatch might come up with something new to hit him with.

Inky's voice came out almost like a question. Almost. "What the _hell_, Mercer. You could have just told me you only had to go after stationary stuff. I can do that. It's not like you have to fight this whole damn war _completely_ on your own."

"I'm not seeing the connection." Alex said. _And since when have you given a damn about __**me**__? _"I can take care of it myself."

"Hah, no. If you take too long, you'll never have time to corner McMullen." Inky shot back. Was it just his imagination, or did she actually seem to be acting like an ally? "I know who you are, what you are, and what you're capable of. Getting across town and eating someone who knows the flight schedule shouldn't be too hard for you. Kafka and the rest of my hounds can take out every virus-detecting machine in the city before it ever becomes an issue."

"If you _can_, I can work with that." Alex said, but a hint of bitterness nonetheless worked its way into his voice. "But you didn't have to insult Dana there."

"I wasn't." Inky said. "She's being mostly kept in the dark—by me _and_ you, remember—but she's not an actual _liar_. I am. Every person you've met since day two is, to some degree. And you can bet your life that McMullen and everyone like him turn out to be liars, too. It's people like that you have to worry about. Not knowing something isn't bad, just dangerous."

"I'll have to tell her everything eventually." Alex summarized. He sighed. "For her own sake."

"Exactly." Inky said. "And trust people carefully. Aside from Dana, never give too much of yourself to anyone."

Alex gave Inky's shadow-hound a sidelong glance. "So I have to be a paranoid consummate liar to survive." _You're expecting Dana to be the one person I can trust freely. I can understand that. But what about you?_ _You're as much a threat to the military as I am, and you have just as much to lose. _"You want me to suspect you, too?"

"Go ahead." Inky said, and that was as close to a verbal shrug as Alex had ever heard. "Whether you trust me or not won't make a difference in the grand scheme of things."

His eyes narrowed. "Why are you helping me at all, then?"

Inky's tone become indecipherable. "You can do things that I can't, Mercer. Just know that I won't turn on you until I reach my goals, and that will be quite a while, by the looks of things." Her voice was getting harder and harder to hear—she was breaking off the conversation. He still heard her bubbly, echoing laugh. "And what can I say? I like men in hoods."

The shadow-hound's eyes disappeared momentarily and when they reappeared, they were the same unintelligent, blank yellow as those of every other shadow-monster Inky controlled. Then four more identical shadow-hounds appeared beside the first. They gave a high, collectively annoying howl and slunk off together like some sort of evil ink, right over the edge of the building. Within minutes, Alex could hear the alarms choking themselves silent and disbelieving shouting drifting all across the city. Soon the air was filled with the baying of the unearthly hounds.

Alex felt like punching a wall. Once again, he had no choice but to listen to Inky's orders. The only thing positive he had to say was this: _At least she's __**honest**__ about manipulating me_.

* * *

The sun was starting to go down before Dana checked the pantry again. Sure enough, Ed was in one of the compartments, devouring the first can of cat food that Inky's food run had given them. It was like having a persistent pet rat more than anything. Ed could get anywhere and Dana couldn't figure out how to keep him out of the damn food. It's not like they had _that_ much to spare whenever he went on a binge.

As for Inky, she had essentially showed up on Dana's front step without any explanation of what she'd been doing or why she'd left, only to find the nearest chair and flop into it. Dana had given her a scathing look when she started snoozing, but didn't ask. It wouldn't do any good to yell at her.

About an hour ago, Inky had woken up, but she seemed distracted. For one thing, Dana had never seen Inky (or anyone else, for that matter) stare at the ceiling for over twenty minutes at a time. The second major hint that something was wrong was that Ed hadn't approached her once since she woke up. And then there was the fact that she hadn't spoken a word since the last time Dana had seen her…

"Inky?" Dana asked from her chair by the computer, shooting her a concerned glance. "Are you okay?"

"I think so." Inky said. "Just having a minor thought tangent." The redhead yawned and scratched her nose. "Nothing to worry about."

"Doesn't seem minor. You've been counting ceiling tiles for nearly half an hour." Dana countered.

"Yeah…so it was a _big_ thought tangent." Inky corrected herself. "It's mostly philosophical stuff that I told your brother about, and now I'm trying to figure out if that's actually what I wanted to say. I'm not sure if I was lying."

_Alex? _"Tell me." Dana said. "And don't give me that bullshit I'm sure you're trying to come up with right now. Tell me the truth."

"It's like…I've built my life on truths. Little things, you know. Like rules to live by." Inky sat up and put her head in her hands. She seemed unusually melancholy, especially considering her normal lackadaisical attitude toward everything. No matter how much it pissed her off sometimes, Dana found herself wishing that Inky wouldn't brood. It didn't suit her.

"One—in a web of lies, force the world to accept your truth. Make _your_ reality the one that matters." Dana couldn't imagine where Inky had learned that, but she had to admit that it worked, if in a highly twisted way. If everyone lied, backing them into a corner would give them no choice but to follow your plan.

"Two—limit your trust. If you can manage to depend on only one person, make that person the one you care for the most." Dana almost winced at that—something had clearly gone wrong somewhere in Inky's past, and to think like that… She felt sorry for the redhead. "You know, I got lucky there. I could depend on six or seven people and know they'd always be there for me. But here? Two, at most." _Alex and me._

"Where was I…? Ah, number three—"_He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you_." Friedrich Nietzsche. My personal least favorite, but the most important to Alex." Inky sighed. Dana wondered why the hell a quote by a long-dead German had anything to do with her brother, but Inky went on tonelessly, "It's not like he understands it yet, but if he isn't careful, by fighting back against BlackWatch and GENTEK, he could end up just as bad as they are."

"Alex won't ever be a complete fucking monster like _they_ are." Dana snapped. Cold or not, Alex was her brother and she wouldn't tolerate _anyone_ talking about him like that. "You'd have to be some kind of raging sociopath to even think that!"

Inky turned her head and Dana nearly flinched. The redhead was smiling, but it was an ironic one. In some ways, it was worse than a death glare. "Don't be so sure."

It took Dana less than a second to regain the anger that had paused for a moment before. "Alex won't go crazy if I have anything to say about it."

Inky's smile grew and, to Dana's surprise, now it was almost sincere. "Good. Hang onto that and maybe he won't."

_What the __**fuck**__?_ "Inky, I don't have time for you dancing around the question like some fucking monkey!" Dana half-shouted, still very aware even when she was angry that there could be ears everywhere. She wasn't _stupid_. "Tell me what the hell's going on!"

"Not going to happen." Inky very nearly leapt from the chair when Dana threw a paperweight shaped like a cat at her, laughing all the while. "See you later, Dana!" and just like that, she was out the door in a flash of red hair.

Dana sat back down in the computer chair, breathing hard just to control her anger. "What the hell was that?"

Ed appeared on the desk next to her shoulder, holding a can of cat food, and whined. His mistress had left without even giving him a pat on the head.

_

* * *

_

At RED CROWN Command, not much was happening. For BlackWatch Captain Robert Cross, also known as the Specialist to his men, it was the third consecutive day of standing at attention at General Randall's side. Not literally, but for someone who wanted badly to be out in the field doing something productive, it was nearly intolerable. Anyone else in his position would have snapped by this point, or at least done something indiscreet enough to get themselves shot in the head by General Randall, but he had more discipline than that. Discipline didn't mean apathy, though. Cross mentally winced every time the casualty report was brought in—more deaths that could have been prevented if they'd just given him the time to train the other soldiers in how to survive.

But there never was any time, because the infection was spreading like wildfire in the population and ZEUS was running loose and murdering half their men before they could even get a shot off. And between General Randall and the other man in the room, GENTEK's Director McMullen, there was enough tension to kill small insects. Cross dutifully did his best to ignore it.

On the bright side (as far as there was one, anyway) General Randall didn't seem particularly angry today. Cross kept his gaze locked straight ahead of him, pointedly ignoring the way Director McMullen kept trying to catch his eye. _Not going to happen. You brought this on yourself._ Without really meaning to, Cross found himself listening intently to the news report being broadcasted on the computer in front of the general. It was something to do. "_…what was initially thought to be a chemical spill was actually a biological attack on the city. Authorities have named Dr. Alex Mercer as the chief susp—_" The old general cut off the report by snapping the laptop shut. He drummed his fingers on the desk.

_Crunch time._ "Sir?" asked Captain Cross, stepping forward. With McMullen here, after however long he was working with those scientists, things are about to get rolling.

General Randall stood up slowly. "At ease, Captain." He waved for McMullen to join the conversation. "Director McMullen, share your data with the captain. Perhaps it will help him complete his mission." There was a hint of something in Randall's voice that immediately set Cross on edge. Whatever would happen now would be at the expense of someone else. Hideously so—General Randall had cultivated an image of ruthlessness that, Cross had found, was completely accurate to the man's true nature.

The doctor began to pace. Cross couldn't tell if it was just a personality tic or if McMullen was nervous to be within striking distance of General Randall. After a moment, Cross decided that both were possible. "Mercer—uh—ZEUS rebuilds on a cellular level. A shapeshifter." Cross glanced at the table and noticed General Randall pulling out a heavily padded case. He flicked it open and McMullen nodded at the syringe inside. It glowed with bright lavender light, just like the Hunters' foreheads. Cross immediately felt warning bells go off in his head. "We've used the DNA sample you recovered to synthesize a pathogen. Inside ZEUS, the pathogen will generate a possible cure."

"You understand your mission?" General Randall asked in a sharp tone, and Cross took the deadly syringe from the case. _Careful, careful…_ No matter his misgivings, Cross knew his duty was to follow orders, not to ponder the moral implications of playing God with something as dangerous as this virus.

And that was why Cross pushed those thoughts away and said evenly, "I'm to inject the weapon into the target, ZEUS, and bring him in." Then that damnable conscious insistently shoved itself forward and he found himself saying, "Sir, with respect, all indications are that—" He reflexively bit off the end of that sentence before he finished it, but completed the thought in his head—_there's more than one enemy. Mercer isn't the only one out there. There's no way he could be in this many places at once, not even with his abilities. There has to be someone else, someone pulling the strings._

He realized what was about to happen about a second before Randall finally lost control of his temper. _Shit_. Randall snapped, "Mercer isn't a "he", it's an it!" He even grabbed Cross's arm and damn near _shook_ him by it, like he was some unruly brat who'd ruined a family reunion out of sheer ignorance. Cross kept his mouth shut, but he wouldn't forget this loss of control. Randall wasn't quite right in the head. The general seemed to remember himself about a moment later, letting go of Cross's arm and saying sharply, "I will debrief you when you complete your mission. _Dismissed_."

Sufficiently assured that his superior was still as ruthless as ever, Cross inclined his head—BlackWatch tended not to need formalities like saluting quite as much, or at least both he and Randall were too irate to notice. Still, he stayed silent as he left the room. He had a lot to think about.

General Randall turned back to McMullen, snorting. He grabbed a file from a nearby table and very nearly laughed when McMullen tried to hide a wince. "The captain always did have difficulty seeing the bigger picture." He tossed the folder onto the table.

It read: _United States Nuclear Ordinance Regulations_.

Neither man noticed the tiny black shadow detach itself from the ceiling high above. With a flick of its fingerlike black limbs and one last blink from a pair of round yellow eyes, it slunk out of the room behind the cover of a dozen crates.

Bat had somewhere to be, too.

* * *

_Everything's going wrong. Can you do something? Anything? If we leave them there any longer—!_

_No. Not yet. You know as well as I do that if we time this wrong, no one will survive the backlash._

_I—_

_We can't afford to screw this up, you understand? If they can't manage a problem of their own creation for that long, they were never fit to live in the first place._

_**You don't mince words, do you?**_

_I don't make a habit of it. Better to be burned by the truth than coddled by lies._

_**I know that as well as anyone else! But it doesn't change the fact that this whole enterprise could be entirely futile.**_

_I…I understand, but is there anything we can do? Even if we can't move our plan forward, there must be something, some small way we can make a difference._

…_What do you think?_

_**One thing. Possibly. It all depends on how much you want to put yourself through.**_

_What do I have to do?_

_**Well…**_

**

* * *

**

**A/N:** Thoughts on my take on Captain Cross and General Randall? I sort of wanted to come up with a reason for why he ended up as an ally instead of just Randall's attack dog, and I think this scene was the start of it.

Inky reads a lot of classic novels. There's only so much to do when you don't have any friends besides your dozens upon dozens of minions. And they're not very interesting individuals. Or not really individuals at all. (Such as Bat.) She tends to dump this sort of thought process on Mercer.

Also, mysterious voices have arrived, as is common to all conspiracy-thriller type movies. If I could, I would have just written their dialogue in different fonts so you could get an idea of their voices, but, well, everyone knows how that works out here.

_**Boss**_

_Subordinate_

_Client_

And so on.


	6. Trapped In The Web

****

Chapter Six: Trapped In The Web

**A/N:** And thus does shit hit the fan.

Yet more cameos ahoy~!

Sorry for being a week late.

* * *

**I swear, everything is up against us! Between the Marines, BlackWatch, the Infected, and however many civilians, there's just no time to sit down and take a godsdamned **_**break**_**. Ugh. What's a girl got to do to find a friendly ear?** She paused. **Well, **_**besides**_** being a normal person in the middle of a panic attack. Fuck that.**

She sighed. Finding an isolated, nigh-impossible-to-reach spot had taken longer than she had wanted, and now the weather looked like it would take a turn for the worst. She could only hope that, when the rains finally came in full-on Wrath-Of-Nature style, the Infected in the sewers would drown. It would save her a lot of effort.

**Let's see…Mercer's apparently waiting on his ex to come up with the next best thing to an HIV vaccine, the **_**USS Ronald Reagan**_** is going to be hanging out south of Manhattan…** She combed her hair with her hand and felt Bat hanging from her thick curls. Carefully, she plucked the palm-sized black creature from her head and addressed it silently, **What is happening, my little minion?**

Bat sent her a flurry of slightly-fuzzy images. She grabbed one from the mess and demanded for her pet to focus, for once. **Who the hell is this? Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but either he has the weirdest body armor I've ever seen or this guy is **_**ripped**_**. I mean, **_**look**_**! He's got more muscle than a Hunter!**

Bat could only give a few contextual clues—all from General Randall's mouth, of course. **So **_**he's**_** the sorry bastard who got tapped to play tag with Mercer. Too bad. Except…what is that thing?** Bat didn't have terribly good eyesight, but it had excellent hearing. She focused on what little auditory memory there was. **"The weapon…" Is this actually dangerous enough to affect Mercer? A cure…I'm probably going to regret this later, but if this is supposed to be the cure-as-sanctioned-by-BlackWatch, then Mercer's ex is playing him. "Samples" could be anything, but given everything else, and what Kafka's pack has been reporting since it was ordered to follow Mercer that first day, Mercer's been helping plan his own death.**

She almost felt like laughing. **Well played, BlackWatch. Karen Parker was never trustworthy, then? Except…** That didn't _quite_ fit, but she supposed it was good enough. There were still a few pieces to the plot missing, such as a compelling motive, but nothing serious enough to be an actual _hole_ in her plans. Now just she just had to find Mercer. Idly, she contacted Kafka.

Then…** YOU "LOST HIM"?!** There came a jumble of images involving tanks and idiot shadow-hounds who couldn't survive being shot in the face by HEAT rounds. Not that anything besides Mercer (or alternately an aircraft carrier such as the _USS Ronald Reagan_) _could_, but that wasn't the point. They'd still managed to fail at the only task she had ever given them _that was actually important_.

Furious, she contacted Ed, only to find that he said he hadn't seen Mercer either. **What kind of **_**idiot**_** goes three days without seeing the only person he can trust? The entire city's out to get him! Except for Dana and me, of course, but I more-or-less **_**told him**_** to give more of a damn about her opinions and feelings than mine—hell, he couldn't hurt **_**my**_** feelings with a flaming jackhammer. SO WHY THE FUCK ISN'T HE LISTENING?!**

Then she tried her oldest tactic, one from the days before she had had access to a network of well-entrenched (if primitive and resource-less) spies. The shadow-queen drew her mind inward, tightening her focus as she began to search the auras of the humans in the city. She tried to reach out; searching for the mental, spiritual signature of someone she'd met not too long ago.

And that was when she first found out that Mercer was completely impossible to detect. No matter where she searched, even extending her "sight" by using her underground beasts as beacons, she couldn't find him. It was like looking for a certain person in a sea of people who all happened to wear the same outfit today. It was the sort of thing that wasn't supposed to happen unless it was deliberate. **Shit! I can't…he…what the fuck is he? This…it's just…MERCER YOU—you…fuck, I can't even think of anything to **_**call**_** him.** She sighed, uncrossing her legs and straightening up a bit. Her legs were falling asleep. **Guess I have to do this the old-fashioned way. Block by fucking block…**

**Kafka, consider yourself demoted. Your job is to find Karen Parker and make sure she doesn't go anywhere. Watch her. And if you fuck it up, I'll kill you and build another Big Gulp from your remains.**

* * *

Alex arrived at Dana's apartment to one of the worst disasters of housecleaning he could remember. He could only assume that most of it was Ed's fault, because there seemed to be a number of bent cans and pillow stuffing lying around. From what he remembered, which was admittedly very little, Dana hadn't chewed on pillows since she was eleven months old.

Wait, where had that come from? There hadn't been any…why was it completely painless to remember things like that? While there were many different points in his memory that were either missing or heavily fragmented, it almost didn't make sense that he would remember that. But…maybe that was the point. Small, pleasant memories could be retrieved with some work, but the bigger secrets of his life he would have to rip out of anyone who knew anything about it.

He heard Dana sigh and glanced at the computer where she sat, trying to ignore the mess while a little black puddle with yellow eyes slunk around the apartment. "It was Ed?" he asked as the flattened creature came upon a can and engulfed it.

"Yeah, it was him." Dana grumbled. She glanced back at Alex and made a frustrated gesture in Ed's direction. "He just went crazy when Inky wouldn't talk to him."

Alex walked over and put a hand on the back of her chair. Dana didn't seem to mind. "She was here? I haven't seen her since yesterday." And that hadn't really counted. She'd just used one of her minions as a telephone.

"She showed up yesterday out of the blue to crash here." Dana explained. She shrugged. "Then she rambled about philosophy for a while and said something about how you should be careful about working against the military." Here Dana actually laughed. "She said you could actually end up as bad as them!"

_Oh __**hell**__. Inky, you—!_ Alex leapt on the sudden guilty impulse that threatened to overwhelm him and squashed it. "She's an idiot." Alex muttered, shaking his head to disguise the fact that the redhead had been utterly, terrifyingly dead-on. She was a space case who apparently minored in the art of being a bitch, but she was right. But if he wanted to survive the fights with Hunters and BlackWatch, he had to be ruthless. If he wanted to protect Dana from people who were on the far side of Nazis on the scale of evil, he had to fight at their level. Inky had only had a hand in part of that—encouraging him to do things he would have done anyway, or backing him into a corner by outlining his (very) few options in excruciating detail. There wasn't really much choice.

"I know." Dana said, half-smiling. She looked away. "I was afraid at first, you know, with everything going on…but I'm okay now."

Alex found himself blinking and was glad that Dana didn't turn around immediately. "You are?" _She…she still…_

"I think so. I mean, I'm still going to worry about you every time you go out—I keep thinking you're going to get caught by the military—but it's not as bad as it was." Dana seemed to smile, but Alex wasn't sure. "I know you'll be careful."

_Laying it on thick, aren't you?_ Alex thought with a mental wince, though he knew she wasn't doing it on purpose. He didn't need Inky (his personal peanut gallery) to tell him that his grasp of tactics was…tenuous at best. If he had been anyone else, as she often informed him as sarcastically as possible, he would have been ground into hamburger a long time ago. "I try," was all he said in response.

"Good. Anyway, I found something that might be useful." She beckoned to him and Alex finally shook off the feeling of guilt before focusing on the screen. "I think I might be able to get you close to McMullen." Alex was interested now.

"The news has been showing an endless loop of BlackWatch scientist showing up at Hives." Almost on cue, the video on screen dutifully restarted. "Stupid thing…anyway, those teams have to be working for McMullen, right? If they are, one of them has got to know how to get to him. Get into one of those areas and draw McMullen in."

That made sense, but Alex nonetheless felt the twinge of guilt return. To draw the Director in, he'd have to consume someone. Again. More likely, actually, many different someones. And Inky had been right yet again. "McMullen is the key to all of this." Alex muttered. _He has to be. He's the only one who knows what happened to me, except maybe BlackWatch. And I'm sure as fuck not going to BlackWatch for that. McMullen's the key, but BlackWatch is the dog whose chain just broke._ He turned to leave. "Thanks, Dana."

"It's fine. Just be careful, okay?" Dana almost sounded pleading.

"I'll try, all right?" _But I can't guarantee anything._ Alex left.

Ed trilled and stuffed himself under a lamp. Dana promptly turned the lamp on and ignored his whines.

* * *

Though Alex would never, ever, ever, _ever_ tell her, he had to admit to himself that Inky's shadowy servants had more-or-less eliminated the stationary virus-detectors as a threat. It was hard to believe she had a single competent bone in her body, but apparently Kafka and its group were much better at causing circuit breakdowns and ventilation clogs than any substance Alex had ever heard of, if the complaints he was hearing from the BlackWatch grunts were any indication.

Of course, the fact that he didn't appear in any form other than that of a BlackWatch officer, even for a moment, probably helped the entire mission along. Ducking around UAV-led patrols was easy enough once he figured out that they came by a given point in the central part of the city maybe once every five minutes, though it did tell him that they were getting paranoid. He'd never seen more than three patrols deployed at once, but that might have had something to do with the losses he'd inflicted on lone tanks and non-armored units before. Or he could just be imagining things, but one of the many bits of advice he'd picked up from Inky could be summed up as "Hey, New York City is the only place in the world you can be paranoid about everything and be totally correct at the same time."

Then again, the rest of that thought trailed off into a rant on Compton and Bangkok and how you couldn't trust anyone with a mole by their left eye, so he wasn't sure how much of that he could trust.

"Sir?" Alex glanced at the non-BlackWatch soldier who addressed him with more than a little hostility. Well, good. While it was nice to know that not everyone here was a blindly loyal psycho, if he was to stay in character, Alex would probably have to shoot him. It seemed like something BlackWatch did on a disturbingly regular basis.

Still, there was a salute there. He'd let the man off lightly. "At ease, soldier." Alex said in the BlackWatch officer's voice, with more venom than he thought was absolutely necessary. BlackWatch seemed to be full of condescending jackasses, and from the man's memory he knew that the man whose skin he wore now was no exception to that.

"With respect, sir, what are we supposed to do with these?" the soldier asked, pointing at a series of strangely unresponsive virus detectors. Alex had to visualize biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. Inky was very, very effective.

If Alex's false face had been visible, he would have given the balaclava-wearing Marine the most disdainful look any BlackWatch officer had ever given a subordinate. "Call in the combat engineers, soldier. Have them fix it."

It seemed like every disrespectful remark in the military was prefaced with "With all due respect". And so the soldier said, "With all due respect, sir, most of the engineers are either in hiding or dead. And now the men are telling stories about these...things..."

_Damn. Inky, you idiot, you never think about silencing witnesses, do you?_ Pushing that thought aside with the reasoning that Inky was insane anyway, Alex said coldly, in his most disgustingly arrogant tone, "I don't have time for chasing fairy tales. Go tell your ghost stories to someone who cares." Then he added, because he was curious and the man didn't seem to back down no matter how nasty he was, "Your name and commanding officer, soldier."

The soldier met his eye squarely. Alex had a sneaking suspicion that no BlackWatch officer would ever take this much attitude from a subordinate, but Alex didn't plan on acting that part of the role. "Private First Class Dunn of Hunter Two-One, 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, under Sgt. Foley."

_Medic-in-training_. Alex thought, looking the man over. _He carries enough crap for it_. But, still, since when were Marines and Army Rangers deployed at the same operation—well, assuming it wasn't, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf or something. BlackWatch was calling in help? Well, between Alex and friendly fire, he could only assume they were running through their men too quickly for the Marines to absorb the losses. Or something.

"Sir?" Dunn asked, and Alex walked off, ignoring him. Let the Ranger bitch to his teammates that BlackWatch was full of arrogant sons-of-bitches who needed a good throttling. It was true, after all.

He didn't need to be there. Alex sighed to himself and headed off in search of an active Hive-based warzone.

It took maybe ten minutes on foot for him to find one. He had actually climbed a fire escape so he could get a better look at the damage from a rooftop. It was exactly as bad as it had seemed from ground level—Infected civilians everywhere, Marines fighting for their lives, BlackWatch rolling out the tanks (occasionally on top of Marines), Hunters biting peoples' heads off, a few normal civilians stuck in the fray and probably going to last all of five minutes, and—_**BOOM**_—now half the debris on the street had caught fire. That wasn't even counting the overturned cars, the smell of burning petrol and human flesh, the sounds of grenades exploding every few seconds, the fact that _somehow_ a traffic median had ended up stuck in a third-story window, and a minor factoid that could be summed up as _Everyone here is fucked._ Other than all that, just a normal street.

_Where's someone who'd know…_ He scanned the street for another BlackWatch officer so he could punch yet another hole in their chain of command, but a Hunter chose that moment to appear and knock him off the roof. _Business as usual, then._

He shifted out of his stolen form and into another—now he looked like a Marine, instead of a white-armored idiot who'd just gotten his sorry ass kicked off a roof—and started running. He sidestepped a knot of Infected bruisers and dove into a sideways roll as the same Hunter tried to make him one with the pavement. Then he scooped up an abandoned M16 and whirled, pressing the end against the Hunter's glowing forehead before it could swipe at him again. He pulled the trigger and felt his arm jolt with the force of the gun firing—apparently, someone had left it on full-auto. It explained why the owner's hand was still attached to the handle, at least—sans body.

Still, half a pound of lead in the brainpan seemed to do the Hunter a lot of good. It dropped dead at his feet.

"That was amazing, sir!" Alex blinked and saw a bloodied Marine running up to him. Almost idly, Alex fired a round into the forehead of the Infected that had tried to sneak up on him, and he gave the soldier a blank look.

"What, soldier?" _I've just been congratulated. By a Marine. __**What. The. Fuck.**_

"It was just a nice kill, is all, sir," the Marine said. "I mean, it's not every day you see someone take on a Hunter and win." Alex detected a trace of a Southern accent there, but it was mostly overpowered by the Military Basic one.

"True." Alex admitted. He brought the gun up again and pumped three bullets into the female Infected civilian that had nearly jumped on his conversation partner's head. "But keep your guard up, soldier. You never know when some fucker's going to take your throat out around here."

"Yes, sir." And the Marine ran off.

_Weird kid._ Alex ducked another blow from a Hunter and hit it in the face with the rifle. It shattered under the combined stress of Alex's monstrous strength and the Hunter's thick skull, but he managed to stick the barrel and half of the stock down its throat. Then an RPG slammed into the creature's side and the problem became moot. Alex took off running.

_Left turn; avoid the barricades; FUCK YOU, HUNTER; dodgedodgedodge—OW!_ Of course some dumb grunt would happen to hit him with an RPG. And if he got up now, his cover would be blown…well, fuck that. He didn't care anymore. He tackled the BlackWatch officer who was yelling at half the soldiers still alive in the area and dragged him off.

Consuming the man brought him the memory of a scientific team supposed to be stationed behind the fighting—they would be brought in to mop up after the military had already killed nearly everything. _That's enough for me._

Oddly enough, though, when he got back into the fray there were no panicked cries of "It's ZEUS!" and once he had managed to get to the stop of a ten-story building, he looked back. Well, either they were too busy fighting the Infected to care much about someone who wasn't directly attacking them, or maybe that fanboy of a Marine had put in a good word for him.

Alex shrugged to himself and ran off toward the "secured" zone.

* * *

On one hand, it was comforting to be among Marines again. The sense of camaraderie was still there after years of absence from the service, and they liked to laugh and joke among the officers as much as any normal person did. The entire experience made Mac Taylor and his fellow CSIs feel slightly more at ease with the entire situation. On the other, it was terrifying, horrifying, and nauseating to be among them when all the forces of Hell seemed to be determined to kill every last human on the island, starting with the Marines.

With the city in a state of urban warfare, the crime scene investigators attached to the NYPD had very little work to do. Most of the post-BlackWatch bodies weren't brought in with any limbs or organs still attached, so an autopsy had rapidly become pointless. After a while, bodies had stopped rolling in at all. Conventional murder had dried up in favor of death via being bitten in half (Hunters), stabbed to death by the ends of a mutated limb and chewed into pulp (standard Infected), and mass cleansing operations that ended with a bullet in every skull (BlackWatch).

It was the sort of thing that would make anyone want to sleep with their backs to the wall and a shotgun in their hands, except that Hunters had already demonstrated their ability to punch through solid steel doors. It seemed like sheer luck was the only thing keeping them all alive.

Mac snuck a glance out the window and groaned—yet again, their street was crawling with homicidal mutant lunatics. Every day, for about a week, the entire block had been considered "overrun" by the authorities. Though Flack was on the radio at least once every few minutes, it didn't seem like anyone believed them when they said no one inside was infected with whatever killer plague was running loose in the city.

_Speaking of running loose, though…_ Mac blinked and was sure he'd just seen a Marine run past at something close to fifty miles per hour. He blinked again and rubbed his eyes. He needed sleep. Glancing at his fellow lookout, Mac said, "Danny, you okay handling this side?"

"Yeah, sure." Danny muttered, his eyes trained on the horde below. "Wait a second…what's that?"

"What?" Mac looked out the window again and saw the horde flailing around almost at random. The sudden flurry of activity was a shock compared to the lethargy they had been displaying earlier, but Mac couldn't hear any screaming, so they couldn't have been going after an unlucky civilian.

"See the black things?" Danny asked in an undertone, pointing at something in the midst of the mob of man-eaters. "They're moving pretty fast, but—"

"I see them." Mac replied. Blood spurted from dozens of different Infected as the black…_things_...tore into them in rapid succession. One slowed and Mac got a good look at it, even from the seventh floor—it had its bear-trap-like jaws latched onto a Hunter's neck and it had four spindly legs that ended in huge black claws. It even had a tail like a spiky club and within moments it was joined by seven of its comrades—they buried the Hunter under their weight and the next thing anyone knew, the street was running with blood. "Jesus."

"How many of those things do you think there are?" Danny asked, leaning back and away from the window.

"Oh, more than you think." Both of them jumped and had their guns out in an instant.

One of the black monsters had somehow snuck up behind them. Its eyes—well, Mac assumed they were eyes—glowed and they could both hear its huge jaws click together. It seemed to grin.

"Sorry to bother you," it said in a voice that reminded Mac of the perky, annoying cheerleader-type of woman, "but have you seen a man who seems a little…off, shall we say?"

Danny gaped at it. "W-What?"

"I'm looking for ZEUS," the beast said flatly. "And don't shoot at me. It won't work and it'll attract the attentions of a certain four-ton pink beastie who happens to like eating little humans like you." It held up a claw-tipped paw. "You have five seconds. One…"

"He went that way." Ma said instantly, jerking his thumb vaguely in the direction he'd seen the crazy Marine run off.

The monster stopped. "That was quick." It paused and Mac could practically hear it do an awkward nonverbal double-take in the silence. "Um…well, I'd better go. Don't worry about the Infected out front. There won't be any left in about a minute or so." And the monster proceeded to melt into the floor.

Mac and Danny shared a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, Mac said, "I'll get us some coffee." _Today is going to be a long day._

* * *

McMullen had been a bust.

Alex had shut down all of the critical virus detectors, fooled the BlackWatch grunts stationed in the area, and even managed to scythe down the remaining Infected in the area with automatic gunfire to the face. And none of it had mattered, because the nearest Hive chose that moment to unleash its last few troops in a move calculated to sabotage any goal Alex had ever entertained as within his grasp. McMullen had taken off, the Hunters had closed in, and for the first time that week, Alex said "Fuck it" to the world at large and murdered everything he could get his hands on.

Even the strike team didn't stand a chance.

* * *

**Found him—wait, what? What the hell? Where'd he go? **She paused.** How does he **_**do**_** that?**

One of her minions stationed near East Harlem piped up. **He's where? Parker…oh shit, **_**now**_**?**

* * *

First there had been the discovery that Karen Parker had identified two separate viruses. He had been sure there was only one, but he hadn't argued. This had led to him running all across Manhattan trying to collect samples from outside a Hive (that the military had already declared war on) and from Infected-incubating water towers (which had an unfortunate tendency of attracting strike teams), while trying to track down people linked to those he had already consumed. He'd found four, and one of them had almost been devoured by Infected before Alex had consumed the entire group, Infected included. Now it was time for the final round, it seemed.

Alex watched as Karen typed away on her computer, noting that while he remembered her from _before_, sort of, there was no actual attraction between them now. There was only a passing concern that paled in comparison with the incredibly strong loyalty he felt toward Dana, but it was better than apathy or outright hate from him. He had enough targets for that. As it was, he _would_ fight for her safety, but if Dana was in danger at the same time, Karen came in a distant second place.

Karen sighed. "The samples you've recovered…I still don't have enough." _What?! But…_ She turned around in her chair and said, with a note of regret in her voice, "I need you to go inside a Hive. The substance at the center—the material the virus is producing—I think it's the key."

_And I thought McMullen was the key. This is going to be a lot harder than she makes it sound._

Karen went on, "With it, I think I can reverse the effects of the virus." Here she paused and sighed, averting her eyes. "And Alex, for what it's worth, I'm sorry it had to play out like this."

Alex didn't like the sound of that regret. He said, "Don't be sorry. Just cure this thing." His voice came out in a growl, though, and he sighed inwardly. He was getting _tired_ of this. Karen was terrified of him, he hadn't talked to Dana since yesterday and even then the conversation had been worryingly brief, Inky had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth even if her pets had not (or else she was doing what he needed her to, which he doubted), he didn't remember if he'd slept in the last few days (he hadn't), and now he knew for sure that the armed forces stationed in Manhattan were _all_ out to get him.

One last thing to do, then, before he and Karen would be able to save Manhattan. He left the room.

Less than a minute later, he was flying across the rooftops. He knew there was only one active Hive in the area, since the BlackWatch and USMC forces had finally managed to force the other one back into the abandoned warehouse it had sprung from and were pounding on it there. That left the other one mostly alone. And Alex was heading there.

Damn it.

Alex landed on the roof without buckling the concrete or having to go to one knee, which he took as a positive sign. Glancing around a bit, he found the skylight and knocked the window out. After that, the only choice was to drop in.

* * *

**Argh! Where the **_**fuck**_** can he be? I have to tell him about that thing in the syringe! It's not okay, it's not okay—AAAAARGH! Out of the way!** She snarled at any of her shadowy pets who impeded her progress and shredded Infected she found in her domain. **Now is not the time for this!**

**How am I supposed to find a **_**shapeshifter**_** in a **_**city**_** of SIX MILLION LIVING PEOPLE GODSDAMMIT?!! AAARGH!**

One of her shadowy minion—a shapeless one that hadn't even been assigned to a group—reported that it had seen someone in a leather jacket much like the one Mercer wore, near an Infected-heavy Hive. Only not as eloquently as that.

**WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SO, DUMBASS?!** The shadow-queen screamed in silent rage below the streets, shaking her fists until the mortar began to shower them in dust.

The shadow on the receiving end of the tirade was squished, while the shadow-queen and her legions sped off.

* * *

"Mercer! You're a hard man to find." Alex turned back, casually swatting aside a bulky Infected with his huge claws. He shifted his arms back to normal as a man dressed all in black—the particular outfit of a BlackWatch officer, in fact—rappelled down from the same skylight he had dropped through. Again?

"The fact that you're here means that Karen Parker betrayed me." Alex said, and he knew it was true. No one else had known he would be here, not even Inky and her network of shady contacts. No one else could have sold him out. There was no reason for a lone BlackWatch officer to be this far out of the primary combat zone, especially since this Hive was hardly active yet. He felt his blood boil. Was it all a lie, then? That there was no cure, that she didn't even want to _try_ to make a cure for the outbreak? _"I'm sorry it had to play out like this"?_ Everything…everything was a fucking _lie_. Alex met the man's stare with the coldest, most hateful look he could manage. He found himself itching to rip the BlackWatch captain limb from limb and didn't suppress the impulse this time.

"She was only doing what she had to do," the man said, pulling something small and silver from his belt. Alex narrowed his blue-gray eyes and his arms shifted back into claws. "She _is_ still on GENTEK's payroll, after all."

Alex dove at him, razor-sharp claws splayed out so he would catch the man no matter where he ran. More than any opponent he had yet faced, more than even the monstrous Hunters, Alex wanted him _dead_. He snarled as he charged, "Who the _fuck_ are you?"

The man shifted his stance ever-so-slightly and the silver rod extended to a staff topped with two prongs that danced with brilliant white electricity. As Alex came within range, the man brought it down on his shoulder. Alex jerked, nearly screaming, and his momentum was broken. Then the electric staff came again, slamming into his side, and it took all of Alex's self-control to roll away.

As Alex stood up unsteadily, trying to make his arms stop convulsing and shifting wildly between normal and claws, he saw the man smirk. Then he spoke. "The name's Specialist Cross."

"Fuck you." Alex growled, struggling to think. Can't get close. Damn it, stupid…_thing_…

Alex backed off slightly, stalking around Cross beyond even his striking distance. He thought carefully, trying to remember how he had destroyed tank patrols and virus detectors from before. The claws were very nearly habit at this point, but those quarter-ton cudgels he'd been able to force his arms to become? Not so much. And either option would only put him within range of Cross's staff.

_But…maybe…_he stretched out his claws, trying to think. Once, while in a blind rage…claws…_down_. Yes.

Alex shoved his right set of claws into the floor of the warehouse, through the layer of bright red biomass, and waited with his eyes trained on cross. The man was pulling out a compact grenade launcher, if there was such a thing, all while seemingly oblivious to the ominous crack shooting straight toward him.

Alex swore under his breath when Cross threw himself to the side just before spikes erupted from the ground where he had been.

"Nice try, Mercer!" Cross called. "But your little friends want to come out and play!" With that, Cross was yanked back up to safety by his Batman-esque zip line and the walls started to explode. Alex gave a wordless snarl.

He started to run as he heard still more Infected erupt from their little cells on the walls and the first of them tried to pounce on him. He crashed into another, ripping it in half, before starting on the rest of them. Then the grenades hit.

Shrapnel burned into him as he tried to fight off the waves of Infected, but he did his best to ignore it. It was easier once the Infected began to realize that Cross—a perfectly normal squishy human—was still in the area and started to attack him, too. In the meantime, though, it meant that he had absolutely no breathing room. Alex slashed wildly, trying to force his way through the press of bodies and bloody severed limbs rained all around him. Not far now…

Cross shot him again, this time at nearly point-black range, and Alex howled, red-hot metal shredding his clothes and his flesh, and was knocked off his feet by the force of it. He was knocked on his face, and the Infected descended on him like a school of piranhas.

He felt his body throb in time with his heartbeat. _Here we go…again…_ He still wasn't sure if his tendrils were weaponized veins, muscle fibers, or just some sort of Lovecraftian monstrosity built into his biology and available at his beck and call, but it didn't matter. Groaning silently, Alex let them loose. Black tentacles formed instantly and shot out from his back, viciously skewering anything within thirty feet. The tentacles drew in then, pulling the dying, dissolving Infected in, and his body absorbed them totally.

He stood up quickly and ran then, just as a set of five grenades exploded where he had been.

"Shit, I'm out!" came Cross's voice from across the room as the last of the Infected fell under Alex's claws. He didn't hesitate and tried the "groundspike" again.

This time Cross yelped. Alex grinned. Finally.

"Squad, on me!" Cross shouted, and Alex saw a group of eight BlackWatch soldiers descend from climbing lines, just like Cross had.

Cross started trying to fire his weapon, but Alex was already running. The troopers started firing, but they couldn't catch him, either. _Not fast enough_.

The grenades hurt, though. This time he would try something on purpose, like he had in order to crush tanks framework. He gasped, forcing biomass toward his left arm. _I need something to death with grenades…something strong enough to take a hit…something strong._

His arm burned and Alex nearly tripped as his weight shifted—his left arm had become a jet-black shield of hardened biomass. Alex ran straight into the next BlackWatch soldier and flattened him with it.

_Down, up, roll, killkillKILL—got you, you son of a bitch—!_ Everything ran on reflex. There was no time to think. Never any time to think. Even as he slashed the next soldier and the next Infected in one blow, temporarily emptying the room of all enemies but Cross, he couldn't stop. More were coming and Cross was still shooting.

"Just a little bundle of energy, aren't you?" Cross taunted, over the sound of blood rushing in Alex's head, over the screams of yet more emerging Infected. It cut through the layers of Alex's blind rage, prodding. Alex seethed. "As if you're afraid you're gonna _burn out_."

_**I'LL. KILL. YOU.**_ The shield on Alex's arm shattered as a final cluster grenade struck it, but he didn't care. His arms throbbed and shifted—now they weren't so much claws as biomass-reinforced black fists with only three fingers each. He could almost remember using a bastardized version of this during his first fight with a Hunter, but he was too angry to care.

As the second wave of Infected approached, Alex grabbed one and tore it in half on the run. Though blood and bone splattered the ground, making it slippery, he didn't care about that, either. He threw both halves at Cross before leaping into the air after them. He twisted n midair and kicked, and the only things that saved Cross from an ignoble death by wall were the fact that it was a glancing blow, and that he managed to smash into a bulky Walker-type Infected first.

Alex stalked up to him, his brain almost fizzing on rage. Die, you mother—

_CRACK_. The electric staff came out almost instantly and struck Alex squarely in the stomach. Cross hit him again—across the face—and Alex felt the third swipe catch him in the side. He arched his back involuntarily—Why is nothing _working_?!—and _screamed_. Even so, he managed to slam one heavy fist into the ground and launch himself away with the force of it.

Then the cluster grenades came again.

_Can't get close, can't even __**touch**__ the bastard, claws too slow with Infected everywhere, gotta __**think**_—

"Nice trick. Not gonna help." Cross said loudly. The only thing Alex was happy about at the moment was that Cross's voice was more strained than it had been. _Good_.

_Range. I need __**range**__. Something fast…_ He forced his arms back to normal as his body lashed out, automatically consuming several Infected via tendril barrage. The earlier pain faded as new biomass was drawn in to replace the parts that have been blasted off.

There was the sound of nylon being pulled through metal.

_More BlackWatch soldiers_, Alex thought. Right arm pulsed.

He lashed out at the men still yards away and his arm obliged. A ribbon of throbbing biomass, tipped with a chuck of black biomass more like an axe than a claw, stretched more than thirty feet vertically and tore into the apparent leader of the descending squad. It took him apart so violently that his torso and legs flew off in entirely separate directions.

Alex's only thought was this: _Good_. Then he struck again and again with the equivalent to biological razor wire, slicing the group to ribbons before they had even made it to the ground. Not one of them survived to shoot at him. Then he turned again to Cross, who was again loading his arm-mounted grenade launcher. Alex brought the shield up on his left arm and waited.

When Cross started firing, Alex went to one knee behind the hardened biomass and swung around it with his whiplike arm.

He caught Cross's foot and as the tentacle curled around his leg, the BlackWatch captain did something desperate. He fired the cluster grenade launcher at the middle of it.

Somehow, having his arm severed didn't hurt much in Alex's opinion. The force of the blast did knock Cross on his ass, though, and that didn't even take into account the shrapnel damage. Still, Cross got up, and, with a muttered curse, fired a hook-line at the hole in the roof and began to be pulled up as he clipped it to his belt.

Alex only paused to shift his arms back to normal before leaping up after him.

* * *

_**Are you ready?**_

_As I'll ever be._

_Why are you sending him?_

_**He's unlikely to do something stupid. You are.**_

_I…I understand._

_The procedure lasts five days and I won't be conscious when it's all said and done. Correct?_

_**Yes. You know what you will have to do?**_

_How could I forget?_

_**Good. We begin now.**_

* * *

**A/N:** Thoughts on the fight? Thoughts on the story as a whole?

And yes, those three named characters who talk to Alex and Inky? They're _exactly_ who you think they are.


	7. Damage Control

**Chapter Seven: Damage Control**

**A/N: **Well, after this…off to the bits with Dr. Ragland?

And a lot of trust issues need to be resolved, _pronto_.

This is a very talky chapter with a lot of short scenes. The killing part comes up in the next one.

* * *

Alex kicked Cross halfway across the roof. The man rolled to a stop eventually, trying to get up by using his grenade launcher—long since out of ammo—as a sort of impromptu cane. Alex stood back nonetheless, wary, pacing carefully out of range of Cross's baton.

"You think you've won, Mercer?" Cross snarled. He leaned back almost as if he was trying to get away, and Alex approached in a roundabout manner, his blue-gray eyes narrowed. He could hold off on his rage for a while, but not forever. Cross probably wasn't the most deserving target on the planet, either—just a soldier following orders, unlike General Randall—but at the moment Alex didn't care about that either. "You don't even know what fucking game you're playing!"

Alex said nothing, barely keeping himself from lunging forward and taking Cross's head off with a swing of his claws. Curiosity went to war with rage in his mind, neither gaining any ground. Cross was clearly at least relatively-low on the military totem pole in terms of simple rank, but with his skill at avoiding death—_hell, fighting me and surviving_—would probably mean that he was more respected than he appeared. He could know something that the foot soldiers didn't, but it was a bit of a long shot. Even as he brought the thought up, though, rage bubbled in his veins again, trying to fight off the impulse toward mercy. It lasted all of two seconds, because then Cross started talking again.

"Well, I can tell you all you need to know," the BlackWatch captain said, and there was something in his tone that made Alex put off killing him for a few seconds longer. _Just maybe…just maybe __**this**__ is the break I've been looking for._ He reached back with his right arm and pulled something from his back pocket, Alex backed away a little more as Cross added, in a much lower voice, "about _Penn Station_."

There was a single, perfect moment in which Alex realized what was going to happen a second before it did. Then the pain hit.

Images arrived in massive bursts of confusing color and distorted sound, always accompanied by a wave of skull-splitting agony that drove Alex to his knees. He clutched his head, biting back screams, as he felt Thor's hammer strike his temple again and again, as the assault of impulses and forgotten pain continued. Men in black suits, all with guns…a red-filled test tube—RAGE…blind, desperate anger…fear…_nothing left to lose_…_**PAIN**_. Alex gasped, trying to force them all back. "Gah…gah…no…" _Fuck, not now, why_ _**now**_?

"I feel sorry for you." _Who said that? Cross? I can't…_ He couldn't really hear anything over the screaming in his head—voices he could remember; faces he knew, could imitate, people he had killed… But Cross had sounded…sad? _Regret?_ _Why? You're only killing a monster…hah…isn't that what they tell you…?_ Then there was a battle cry, and Alex suddenly knew the earlier waves agony paled compared to this. The last thing he felt was something thin and sharp digging into his shoulder, touching bone, and an abrupt biomass shift. _Something's wrong…_ He blacked out.

* * *

Cross sighed, tossing the syringe aside. "ZEUS is down. Bring in the containment device." He couldn't imagine what in all of creation could hold him—hadn't Greene, the weaker of the two monsters destroying Manhattan, been able to break free of the top-secret, highest-level-security-possible facility she had been in? The only thing Cross thought could contain Mercer for any amount of time was a steel-and-carbon-fiber-and-titanium box that was both welded shut and located at the bottom of the ocean.

That was the problem, wasn't it? Though as far as he could tell Mercer had been an accident of chance and extremely bad luck, Greene was something else. From the reports he'd gotten from the few BlackWatch soldiers who had survived her jailbreak, she was much less active than Mercer and, if anything, more of a reaction-based hostile. She would wait and wait for however long it took for something to trigger her aggression, and then it was all over.

Mercer took the exact opposite route and seemed to be the cause of most of the non-Infected-caused losses the military as taking.

He almost didn't want to look back—he knew exactly what Randall and McMullen would do to ZEUS once they had him—but jumped when he heard a rushing noise.

He almost managed, by virtue of a lifetime of military training, to turn in time for a counterattack. Almost.

"_HEY, CHUCKLEHEAD!!_" Something big, black, and very fast swung in a dangerous arc and caught Cross in the side. He blinked once, before the pain registered, and realized that it was basically a long black whip with a cinderblock on the end, swung by a shadowy…person who stood over Mercer—and that was about when he went over the edge of the roof.

The only thing that saved Cross from ending up flat on the ground—which was five or six stories below—with even more broken bones than he already had was a small, jet-black hand that shot out of the side of the building and caught his wrist. It still hurt like a bitch.

* * *

Alex blinked and jerked to his feet almost instantly, stopping when he realized that Cross was nowhere in sight. Though the haze of pain centered in his right shoulder, he realized that, instead, Inky stood there in her human form with her shadow armor rapidly boiling away in the sunlight that made it through the clouds. She crossed her still-armored arms and a cinderblock dropped from one of her hands, punching a jagged hole through the roof of the warehouse. She was glaring at him.

"I…" Alex had no idea what to say, and beyond that, wasn't really sure he wanted to talk, either. He'd trusted Karen more than he'd trusted the redhead—mostly due to Inky's own testimony of her unreliable nature—but now her betrayal burned so deeply that Alex hesitated. He didn't want to have to go through this again, not so soon.

"Alex…do you remember what I said about liars?" Inky asked in a surprisingly quiet voice. Her shadow armor had disappeared completely.

And…she'd never called him by his first name before. It was always "Mercer" this, "Mercer" that, and indirectly as "Dana, your idiot of a brother." He stared at her, not willing to believe that she had changed her opinion of him at all.

Unable to reconcile the two contrasting images—the playful, devil-may-care side of her and the concerned, almost motherly aspect she was showing now—Alex did his best to ignore her comment. It would probably pass. "Come on. Let's get out of here," he said gruffly, wincing internally as his shoulder throbbed viciously.

Inky's eyes narrowed, but she nodded and disappeared over the side of the roof. When Alex didn't hear a crunching noise or a scream for a few seconds, he followed.

He should have known that she wouldn't just leave it at that.

* * *

She should have been angrier, she knew. He was being stupid and showing it by trying to hide the fact that he was dealing with a betrayal. She was far too perceptive to fall for that lie. And on top of that, attempting to brush off the fact that his fight with Cross had left him severely weakened…it annoyed her, but she could understand why he did it. He didn't trust her—which was good considering that she had _told_ him to—but now it was becoming a hindrance. She understood that Parker had thrown him to the wolves, but considering that, even among those wolves in BlackWatch, he was like a fox in a henhouse, she didn't really see why.

**Except…well, he's only got two people to depend on now. Between Dana, Karen, and me, he almost had something like a functional support group. **She frowned as they made their way past a BlackWatch patrol that was missing both of its UAVs. **Thank you, Bismarck. **The soldiers paid no attention to the Marine and redhead walking in the opposite direction, thank goodness. **At least his become-anyone-he's-eaten ability still works; otherwise we'd be completely fucked. Between my weakness to sunlight and his sudden-onset ability-crippling condition, we'd never make it past those guns alive.**

**And come to think of it…I probably should tell him what was in that syringe. Even though it's not my fault that his top speed is like six times faster than mine and I couldn't reach him before because he'd ditched Kafka, I owe him that much.**

"You know, I don't think I've ever met someone as stoic as you pretend to be," she informed him, walking ahead a little. They turned vaguely in the direction of Dana's safe house, taking a roundabout route to be sure they weren't being followed.

"Who said I was pretending?" he replied, and she thought it odd how he could be so childish. Petulant. Something like that.

She shrugged. "I've seen you snap in the middle of a fight. If that isn't pent-up rage, I'm the great nephew of Abraham Lincoln."

"Given how many secrets you have, I wouldn't be surprised if you were." Mercer replied scathingly.

**Oh, do you hate me because I insist that some things are private?** "Well, I'm not. And anyway, I'm not mad at you for it. I'm just a little annoyed at the woman who put you in this situation, I guess."

She could practically _hear_ him blink. "Karen? Why?"

"Well, she _did_ backstab you," the shadow-queen said mildly, baiting him. "If I ever see her, I'll probably give her a real talking-to. By which I mean she'll be on the wrong end of _my_ bad mood." **And maybe I'll understand **_**why**_**. Up until I found out she was passing the samples on to Cross, I thought she was legit, too.**

"Not if I get there first," Mercer growled. Then she saw him wince and realized that his extra powers—the claws, the heavy fists, the black bludgeons; everything—were all sealed up tight inside him and every time he tried to access them caused him pain. **I should have **_**known**_**. I knew BlackWatch had some sort of parasite to use on him, but I didn't think they'd design it to **_**cripple**_**, not kill him. Or that he'd be paralyzed like that from just a memory… And they called it "the cure"? Bullshit.**

"Maybe later, after you're recovered. Then you can go after her," she conceded. **You probably won't, though. There's a lot of activity on BlackWatch's end, and even though I don't know quite what's going on, I think you'll be too busy to care about Parker after a few days.**

He gave her an incredulous look. "What are you, my mother?"

**No, but I'm starting to get an inkling of who is.** "Shut up. I'm only trying to help," she snapped. When he started to open his mouth, she said in a low voice, "No, you listen to me. You can't afford to get in a fight with the military now. There's nothing you can do but head home and go see Dana. Talk to her. Tell her everything if she asks."

There was a moment of silence broken only by the sounds of a dying city all around them. Then, "I can't."

"Why not?" she asked.

"Dana…she's innocent in all of this," he said, waving a hand around as if to indicate the entire city. "If I tell her…"

"She's not." Alex stared at her. "Look, a whole lot of people in this city are completely fucked because of a decision by one or two people. There's like a million dead bodies all over the place already." She held up a hand to stop him from interrupting. "Whatever "innocence" this city had is pretty much gone. Tell her. She already has to deal with me, you know. I don't think that knowing what you do will make much of a difference."

"You haven't killed anyone, though." Alex replied, but without any sort of venom. "My hands…"

"Are covered in blood, yes," she said dismissively. "But you did most of it to protect her, and besides, just because I haven't killed anyone here doesn't mean I haven't before." She shrugged again. "But I think it might be time for a bit of soul-cleansing anyway."

Alex gave her a sharp look.

"Don't look at me like that. It's not like I'm going to bare my entire life's story for you, but I might tell you a bit," she said with a wink. "Come on. Let's go home."

* * *

Dana sat back in the swiveling computer chair, trying to come up with an answer to Inky's first question upon entering the apartment. "What do you want to know, then?" _Well, a lot of things._ But it was probably better to start small. She'd probably tell them more if she was eased into it.

Alex leaned on the wall, apparently sleeping upright, but Dana knew better than that. She could tell that he was in pain, somehow, and that he wouldn't tell her why no matter how she pried. It wasn't how her big brother dealt with things. He internalized them until the situation exploded.

Looking back at the grinning redhead, Dana finally asked, "Where are you from?"

Inky winked. "I can't tell you the specifics, but it's a city a lot like Amsterdam. Like the Sin City of the north, you know?" She was starting to mime something with her hands, but damned if Dana had any idea what it meant. "Drugs, sex, violence, but the city worked. There weren't any tall buildings, and a lot of it was surrounded by a cross between farmland and tundra, but there was a pretty big shipping area for supplies to come in from the south during winter. I grew up there."

Dana was trying to visualize such a city and came up short. It sounded like someplace in Canada.

"Anyway, I lived around there until I was about fifteen. Then I left. Anything else?" Inky seemed rather pleased with the line of questioning and smiled at both of them.

"Why did you leave?"

Inky looked up at the ceiling as if she was remembering something pleasant. "I had to. Turns out most people didn't like it when I stole stuff from them." At Dana's surprised look, she added. "You've seen what I can do. It's obvious that a thirteen-year-old version of me would think of stealing things first. I stole from a lot of people in those two years, fought a couple people 'til near-death so I could keep my loot... And, the other thing…well, I left because I was following a guy."

Dana had to stifle a giggle. Between Inky's apparent embarrassment and Alex's look of flat-out disbelief, it was nearly impossible. The redhead colored brightly and scratched her head, looking away. Seeing Inky now and then trying to imagine her as a boy-crazy fifteen-year-old was just too funny.

"It was a long time ago, you know." Inky said petulantly, trying to stop Dana from laughing at her expense. "But I couldn't help it, really! I've always had a thing for hoods, so… Gods, looking back on that makes me feel like such a hormone-driven brat…"

"It happens to everyone." Dana said, smirking.

"Probably not to you." Inky muttered, absentmindedly twisting her hair into ringlets. "I was curious, I admit. You don't get far in the docks by trusting people, just by bribing or threatening them. I wanted to know why he'd saved me from the mob coming to lynch me for stealing and pawning off their things, and then I found out how screwed up he was."

"'Screwed up'? Like how?" Dana asked, frowning slightly.

"Psychologically broken." Inky said flatly. "He was the sort of person you never wanted to send out on a battlefield because you'd never know when he'd snap or break down. I saw that and…and I thought, 'Well, isn't this perfect? But I can do this.' I really did. I was sure I could make it work—still crushing _hard_, remember—and for a while, it did."

To the silence of both Dana and Alex, she went on calmly, "It took a few months before our pasts started catching up to us. I got chased around for a while by some asshole for skipping bail—like _hell_ I was going to prison—and he…well, I decided I had to stay out of trouble long enough to rescue him from whatever ring of hell he'd gotten himself dragged to. I was stupid then, figuring I could handle everything myself." She sighed and shook her head. She was smiling again, but Dana wasn't sure if this was a genuine one. "I met more people I could trust. They helped me get him back and helped us get settled down where they were from. It was almost like a happy ending, except for the ending bit. And that's where I was before I came here."

Dana shook her head. "You sure did go a long way for him."

"I know." Inky replied, suddenly grinning. "But we're both better now, and we got married a while ago."

"…you're married?" Alex's voice sounded rather…shocked. _Got a reaction out of him, Inky? Good for you._

"And you're not. So, _nyeh_." At the last bit, Inky stuck her tongue out at him. "And now you know where the hoodie comment comes from." Oddly enough, while the flip between silly and serious seemed to suit her, but the shift from resignation to playful scheming did not. And Dana couldn't tell if any of them were for real or not. _She's a good actor._

_Well, so much for the foray into the realm of maturity_. Dana thought. _And all of that was deliberately vague_.

"Your turn." Inky said to Dana, smiling even with her hands clasped in front of her face like some James Bond villain.

…_Oooookay then_. "Not much is really happening here." Dana replied. "I read the news sometimes, try to keep Ed from eating everything that isn't nailed down or on fire, and do research on the side." _And I've heard and read a lot of things I can't…I __**won't**__ believe until I hear it from him._ "Alex."

He shrugged.

"Oh, come off it." Inky said, sounding annoyed. Dana glanced at her, surprised—_She __**has**__ to be bipolar_, she thought—and Inky growled. "Either you tell her or I'll throw you out the window and do it myself, and you _really_ don't want me to tell her." _We don't even have a window._

"No." And Dana could tell that Alex was uncomfortable with the idea of telling her whatever secret there was and, for better or for worse, she was almost sure she knew why.

He didn't have to say anything, but she wanted to hear it anyway. Not from the reporters, not from the military, not from Inky. From him. Whether he would tell her or not remained to be seen, but she already thought she knew. It hurt a little, but she guessed shrewdly that it hurt him a lot more.

He was a mass-murderer. The number one threat to the United States military in all its glory. And he was still her brother in spite of that. She'd understood it days ago, when Inky had brought up the philosophy lecture she'd given him. She'd defended him because…because she was his sister and he was her big brother, and that was that.

Inky stood up. "Well, _fine_. If you're just going to sit here and _mope_, I'm going out to find out what the hell is going on. And I'm not going to tell you what that _thing_ Cross injected into you was. Figure it out yourself."

"Inky, what the hell is wrong with you?" Dana demanded.

Inky rounded on her. "What's _wrong_ is that all of us are keeping secrets from each other for stupid reasons! I know why _I_ am—because pretty much none of it is relevant and won't help us succeed in whatever the fuck our goal actually is—but seriously, you two are supposed to be brother and sister! What the hell is wrong with you two?"

Dana would have shot back with something twice as scathing as anything the redhead could ever dream up—she was an acclimated New Yorker, after all—but she was distracted when Alex abruptly grabbed his right shoulder with a noise that sounded like air escaping a pipe. While she knew Inky was starting to move, trying to get to her brother before he fell or screamed or _something_, Dana didn't care.

She eased her brother down until he was seated against the wall, still hanging onto that shoulder in a death grip, but then Inky roughly shoved her out of the way and scrambled over to his right side. While Dana also wanted to see what was wrong with her brother, Inky looked like she'd give her a black eye if she tried to look. Ordinarily Dana wouldn't have cared and would have just punched right back, but something in the redhead's expression stopped her.

"Dana, what did you have on your computer that you wanted to show him?" Inky asked coolly as she poked and prodded between Alex's whitening fingers. Now she was all business, dealing with the situation like…like a soldier.

"Y-yeah." Dana said, pushing the thought aside. She went back to the computer and brought up another page. By doing so and looking away, however, she missed the bit where Inky tested Alex's pain reflex by slapping him across the back of his head, _hard_. While Alex didn't snarl and try to strangle her, it did snap him out of the immediate reaction to the flare-up of whatever was hurting him.

But Dana didn't know this part, only that both Alex and Inky were crowding around the monitor a moment later. Dana blinked rapidly and gave the redhead a surprised look, but chalked it up to Inky's eccentricities and her brother's resilience and moved on. She was getting the impression that asking too many questions would just make both of them uncomfortable.

"They're watching someone for McMullen." Dana explained, neatly cutting off any questions they may have had about why the picture or the report was even halfway relevant. "It's this doctor called Bradley Ragland. He's a good guy, and if we're lucky, he'll help us get to McMullen. He's uptown at St. Paul's Hospital. He runs the morgue there."

She caught a brief frown from both of them—she suspected that Inky already had a way to reach McMullen, given her powers, and that Alex, for whatever reason, didn't like the word "morgue." She'd have to ask him later.

"And I'll be able to run distraction duty if you go see him." Inky told Alex, smirking a little. "Hell, I could have Kafka or Ed or someone wreck the local scenery for a few hours and come along for the trip. What do you say to having me annoy the military?"

Alex gave her a flat look, shaking his head. "Better them than me."

Dana had the odd feeling that she was missing half of the joke.

"Okay…well, anyway, I did some research on Hope, Idaho." Oh, _now_ she had them interested. "It was an Army town. On July 21st, 1969, it vanishes from the map. The "official word" was that it was an anti-government gun-nut standoff. The militia killed a bunch of people, and the Feds killed the militia." She brought up a graying, faded picture. "Notice a girl, second from the left?"

"Elizabeth Greene." Alex muttered. "What's this, the class of '68 or something? She could be a grandmother by now."

"Hey, watch the age quips." Inky said. "She's still younger than I am."

She was met with two flat looks of disbelief. "What? I aged gracefully."

Dana rolled her eyes and turned back to the photo. "Looks a lot like a college student these days. Not bad for fifty-five years old."

"Pshaw. The lady I used to work for is way older than that and looks around thirty." Inky muttered, but the comment went ignored.

"Hope, Idaho was an experiment…" Alex murmured absently, apparently not even noticing that she could hear him.

Dana spun the chair so that Inky had to jerk upright to avoid being flung to the floor and stood up. She faced her brother, tilting her head curiously. "How could you possibly know that?" _Please don't let the rumors be true…_

Alex looked away briefly, his mouth twisting. "The people I've killed…" _No…_ "They're in me. I can hear them, see the things they've done—"

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Dana asked fiercely, grabbing his arm.

"And could you put that any _worse_?" Inky demanded, crossing one leg over the other while sitting on the desk. "You sound like a schizophrenic."

"You don't understand!" Alex whirled and snapped at both of them. Dana backed up out of reflex, but Inky jumped up from the desk and her dark blue eyes flashed as she placed herself almost directly between the two of them. "I understand it all. I have to do these things…that it's right…I can feel it."

"You don't _have_ to do a fucking thing." Inky snarled, and Dana saw the corners of the room begin to swirl in and out of focus. _Shit…_ "But you will stop threatening either of us nonverbally right now or I will find some way to _murder_ you!" On the word "murder," her voice had echoed from all around the small apartment, apparently amplified by the presence of her minions.

Dana backed into the desk and braced herself there, shaking. She was horrified to find that she had no idea which side she wanted to take—her brother the confirmed murderer, or Inky, the woman with the past she wouldn't elaborate on. She'd seen the desperation, the anger, and the burning need to _know_ in Alex's face then, and it scared her. She could barely remember the time she had been this scared before. It had only been a week since Alex had been forced to kill that BlackWatch trooper to save her life, and yet it seemed so far away… "Go find Ragland. Both of you." She looked away then—didn't see the shock that coursed through her brother's body as he took it as a flat out-rejection—and, when Inky murmured something, added in a near-scream, "Get _out_!"

When she opened her eyes and looked back, both of them had vanished and Dana sank to her knees. _**Fuck**__. Why did it have to turn out this way?_

_I __**saw**__ what this was costing him—what this was costing them both to come clean…but it's just…_ She buried her face in her hands. _God-__**fucking**__-damn it. Alex…_

* * *

They had barely gone half a block in surly silence before Inky said abruptly, "Go back."

"What are you on? She'll—!" And Inky's blue eyes narrowed right before she whacked him upside the head. "What the fuck was that for?!"

"I'm telling you, explain why you weren't saying anything _and_ the rest of the situation or she'll carry a grudge like nobody's business. I'll go ahead and bother Ragland for a while or shoot squirrels or something." Inky said hotly. "Just don't let her stew on it or you'll live to regret it."

"How?" How the hell was he supposed to explain that he didn't know what he was doing half the time and had only even found out she existed from killing one of the men trying to kill _him_? That every person he'd killed was either in the military or a BlackWatch sleeper agent, and that he was spent most of his time terrified that they'd find Dana and kill her? That everything in Manhattan seemed determined to kill him for something he just _could not _remember? That maybe, just _maybe_, he was responsible for unleashing the viral outbreak a week ago and _definitely_ was guilty of setting that _fucking_ _monster_ Elizabeth Greene free?

"I don't know! Just don't ruin one of the few decent relationships you have left." Inky said, biting her lip. _And she just __**hit**__ me. You wouldn't think so with an act like that_. "Start from the beginning. Tell her why you had to kill BlackWatch thugs originally, then work your way up from there. Chances are she suspected at least some of it to begin with—no one stays deaf and blind to all the shit going on in town right now. Let her ask questions. Do _something_.

"Easy for you to say." Alex growled. "You didn't—"

"Shut up and just go see her."

After a bit more arguing—and a minor fistfight in which Inky smacked him a couple more times and Alex had to hold back his strength to an annoying degree—he did.

* * *

Dana was surprised to see her brother back so soon and nearly threw him out again, but eventually allowed him to stay to give his side of the story. She'd come so close to believing everything the news reports said about him, but he allowed her to ask her questions this time. It gave her a bit of hope.

It took a long time to pry the truth from him. Dana had turned the office chair around so she could watch his expression as he paced and talked. Sometimes he stopped, trying to fill in the blanks as he went along or else wincing as his right shoulder throbbed again. Alex didn't ever seem like he wanted to stop, though. He _wanted_ her to know.

He told her about waking up in the GENTEK morgue and how his first memory consisted of only a few things—the names, the fact that he had worked on Blacklight (whatever that was), and pathologists screaming while running away from him, even though just a moment before that they had been preparing to cut him apart. Being shot at by BlackWatch after seeing the hazmat suit-wearing pathologists gunned down execution-style.

How his first kill wasn't long after that and then, after the second, realizing that she was in danger, but having no idea how he knew, only that she was going to end up dead if he didn't hurry. Then there was his third kill upon finding the BlackWatch thug that had been ordered to "purge" her.

Meeting Inky at the same time as Dana did and forming a partnership with the flakiest, most unpredictable being this side of Hell.

Releasing Elizabeth Greene. The military base being destroyed as the apocalypse was unleashed on New York again.

Finding out what resources BlackWatch was willing to throw against him, and then the process of exterminating the teams sent to track him down. Adding yet more deaths to the total, all in the name of defending either himself or her.

Meeting Karen Parker for what felt like the first time and starting to find components for a "cure." It was nothing but a pretense for yet another attempt on his life.

Being betrayed by Karen and running headlong into Cross, unprepared, and the subsequent fight. Being injected with something, if Inky's testimony was worth anything.

Dana said nothing for a long time after Alex finished. Then, as he was starting to leave, she said quietly, "I don't hate you." Then he was gone.

* * *

One of the first things he noticed was that the military didn't seem to be out in force today. Though Alex could hear shooting from about a dozen blocks away, no one converged on their position. Sighing, he nonetheless took a civilian disguise—well, more like plainclothes-BlackWatch agent disguise—before he entered an open area. He felt his body shift mass and structure a little and as he did so, he reflected bitterly that if it hadn't been for sheer desperation he would have never taken a human life to begin with.

But looking back on his list of victims, he couldn't deny that, almost down to a man, they had deserved it.

He walked the entire way to St. Paul's Hospital like a normal person. There were no virus detectors to sabotage, no UAVS to lead strike teams to him, and no BlackWatch troops to shoot at him out of sheer paranoia. Aside from the entirely-rational feeling of uneasiness he got from the situation, he reasoned that half of the virus detectors—airborne or not—were out of commission thanks to Inky's minions and that still more of those black creatures would probably have everyone in the city jumping at shadows for months. Though, considering that Inky's minions could win against even Hunters through a seven-to-one majority of numbers, he supposed he was probably not the worst thing that could have happened to the military.

Well, maybe he was, but not by much.

Alex didn't have to work very hard to get into the morgue, mostly because any virus-detectors Inky hadn't already torn apart were useless here and the hospital was so overcrowded that no one cared if one more man wandered in. He wasn't even sure the receptionist had _seen_ him. Certainly no one seemed to mind him riding the elevator down.

He shifted back to his normal body and winced, feeling the swollen mass that marked the _thing_ that had infected him. He didn't fully understand what it was, only that he was sure it was eating him alive from the inside out, it hurt like hell, and that it was Cross's fault he had it. All in all, it was a poor checklist.

He found Dr. Ragland looking over a corpse warped by infection and displaying giant welts and sores not unlike the one Alex was sure was attached to his own shoulder. The medical examiner was a black man on the far edge of middle age, probably closer to fifty. He was had deep-set lines on his face—laugh lines or stress marks, Alex wasn't sure—along with thick glasses, a high forehead, and hair just starting to turn gray from age. For all Alex knew, he could be someone's kindly grandfather, but he was steady despite his age and the stress that was no doubt part of the job. Alex had seen enough people snap under similar pressure, though he wasn't sure where.

Inky stood behind him, sitting on one of the exam tables and watching what he was doing. Occasionally she'd hand him a scalpel or something, as if she actually knew what he was doing. She turned her head to face Alex and smiled, pressing a finger to her lips for silence.

Alex shook his head. He didn't have that much time and Inky knew that. No matter the good doctor's feelings on the matter, he needed to get this over and done with.

Inky nodded. "Okay. Dr. Ragland, this is the patient I was talking about."

Ragland looked up and blanched.

Alex couldn't blame him.

* * *

**A/N:** And that's the end of chapter seven, the introduction of another major character, the dropping of a minor one, and the solving of a few internal problems in their little group.

And if you'll excuse me, I feel like dropping dead of exhaustion.

I hate school.

And below is an _omake_, or bonus (irrelevant) section, for those who want to know how the opening scene would run with Inky in it.

* * *

_Omake_—What In Hell Does Inky Do When _Alex_ Does The Planning?

"Aaargh! _OhshitohshitohshitohSHIIII—!_" Of course. Of course the one time I ever listen to him there's an Infected horde right outside. It's like some godforsaken law of drama—nothing in a horror movie can ever be done without risking horrible maiming and/or brain-munching. Why did I have to watch _Night of the Living Dead_ before coming out? Granted, it wasn't my apartment and I was just looking for stuff Dana would be able to use, but still. Bunch a' zombified assholes.

And why the hell did I decide to wear heels today? Okay, first thing, ditch the shoes even if there's broken glass everywhere…wait, not, screw that. Even if a heel breaks there'll be better options than that.

Okay, be_tween_ the wrecked cabs, _o_ver the hood of that ugly Impala, hope to heaven and hell (because it's hard to say at this point which one is more relevant) that they aren't as—ah, _fuck_, they are fast. Damn you, Romero! You and your stupid misleading shuffler-type zombies are going to get me killed!

Oh hey, lights. Lights mean people, so…hey, maybe I can get them to eat someone else instead! Woo!

_**BAM!**_ Fuck, car. Okay, head hurting, owowowow… "Hey, you're BlackWatch, right?"

"What the—where did you come from?"

Um. "That way? Oh, and I'm being chased by crazy people. Help?" Oh, again with the roaring and the screaming. _Always_ with the screaming. Time to get off my ass, then. Okay, up and away while they're distracted. To the sound of automatic gunfire, one, two, three…I think I'll need a _big_ head start.

"Halt!" What, the shooting's over already? Like _hell_ I'm stopping, you gas-mask-wearing, goose-stepping, Combine-rip-off _motherfucker_! And exit stage left, pursued by a bunch of Nazi rip-offs and the extras from _28 Days Later_. I would rather live. Well, usually. Maybe not here, anyway. This neighborhood's gone downhill _fast_.

"Screw you, BlackWatch!" Well, now they're shooting at me. What, scared I'll bring your precious disease too close to someone else? Hah. I hope you appreciate this, you crazy hoodie bastar—! "WHAT THE HELL?! That was my knee, you—!" Oh well. From the sudden screaming back there, it won't matter much. Doesn't look deep, anyway.

"You could have just taunted them into shooting each other." A sigh. "Why do you always try to make things more complicated?"

You godsdamned _idiot_. "Oh yeah, like they'd waste bullets on me after that debacle at Times Square. Did you not see them try that and run out of shit to shoot? Hell, they'd probably think—"

"That's not what I meant. I mean, also, why didn't you just escape with whatever the hell ability you did before?"

What. The. _Hell_. I _forgot_ my own powers. Excuse me, Manhattan, as I try to knock some sense into myself using this wall. Bonk. Ow. Okay, that's enough.

A shrug. "Thanks." Gravelly-sounding as usual, Mercer. Well, you look okay, considering that you seem determined to take at least one RPG to the face every time you get in a fight.

"Yeah, yeah. Find what you needed?" Don't be polite. It only encourages him. And it doesn't suit you _or_ me anyway, Mercer.

"Mm-hm. It should all be over by tonight."

"Okay." You're a liar, 'cause it _won't_ be over until everything damn well burns, but you're too blinded by optimism and _stupid_ that you can't see that and…well, screw this. "Get moving, then." I want to go to bed.

And I am never agreeing to any of Mercer's plans _ever_ again.


	8. Unknown Soldier

**Chapter Eight: Unknown Soldier**

**A/N: **Title taken from a Breaking Benjamin song. Yes, it's relevant.

Well, sort of. Also, many apologies in many languages for being so very late. :(

* * *

Doctor Bradley Ragland rarely knew what to think since he had found out about GENTEK's darker side. A farce of a pharmaceutical company founded by McMullen and designed by BlackWatch to produce more powerful bioweapons—that was the GENTEK he knew now. He had opted out of their employ after one horrible creation too many: Blacklight. Making the already-deadly Redlight strain even more dangerous was one like he would not cross as soon as he realized how many people could have been destroyed if a sample was leaked, even in a miniscule amount. He'd even met his replacement once, on his way out of the building for the final time, and that once had been enough. Dr. Alexander Mercer had been a monster wearing a human face, even all those years ago.

Now it was just more literal.

The red-haired woman who introduced herself as Inky seemed normal enough. Until she had started talking, anyway.

She had laid out, quite clearly, Ragland's options. She knew enough of his previous vocation as a researcher under McMullen that she could have turned him over to anyone with the power to have him shot dead, but she was willing to make a deal. She needed him to take a look at someone who showed none of the normal symptoms of being infected by the virus, but who was nonetheless infected. She had said, very carefully, that she had no intention of physically or mentally harming him in any way, but that she couldn't guarantee his safety if he didn't cooperate. She had no control over BlackWatch or GENTEK's more shadowy elements, and she didn't know if the Infected would target the hospital, but she pointed out that none of that was her responsibility or, if any of the scenarios came true, her fault.

And when Ragland had thought about pressing the silent alarm and made half a muscle twitch toward it, Inky had gone very still and said coldly, "There is no force in the world that can face me as I am now. Dr. Ragland, think very carefully about alerting security forces in any way and weigh it against your desire to be a happy grandfather to Rochelle and her cousins. If you call security, and they alert BlackWatch, you will _die_."

He didn't ask how she had known that.

Then Inky had sighed and said that if he was really that opposed to working with her, she could just as easily work with him. And, with that, she'd gone and fetched his scalpels for him.

It was slightly disturbing how she didn't flinch from the bodies' hideous mutations at all—in fact, she was humming and dancing to her own mental song whenever he wasn't asking for something. He'd been a coroner for years and he knew there wasn't much the NYPD could bring in anymore that would bother him, but he was sure that Inky had no such experience. Unless, of course, she was just as dangerous as she said she was…

Mercer, however, was a thousand times worse.

Ragland didn't know, exactly, what Alex Mercer had become since the Penn Station incident. Frankly, the fact that Mercer was a confirmed sociopath was enough to make Ragland refuse to associate with him, but Inky had given them both a level, eerily calm stare and Mercer hadn't made any trouble yet. Ragland decided to wait them out.

"How'd the thing with Dana go?" Inky asked as Mercer tried to be unobtrusive so Ragland could finish his autopsy on the man brought in from one of the Hives. It wasn't working.

"She's fine." Mercer rumbled. "I think she has to think on it a bit more, but we're not…"

"You're not going to be thrown out on your ear, you mean," the redhead finished. She smiled faintly. "I'm glad."

Mercer brushed off the comment with a sigh and Ragland blinked at the brief flash of utter exhaustion in his face. He _remembered_ Alex Mercer, or so he'd thought. Average height, average build, brown hair clipped short and blue-gray eyes cold and featureless like the heart of a glacier. He'd changed so much since Ragland's brief encounter…it seemed impossible. Sociopaths could easily fake emotion.

"The Penn Station bodies used to be here, didn't they?" Inky said conversationally. "That's why you need us to see if we can get you to them, or bring them here, because you never finished the autopsies. You never did say how you got them, though—GENTEK was supposed to have exclusive access, because then BlackWatch would be able to keep them under wraps."

"That's right." Ragland admitted. "But I'm also one of the few people who know enough about GENTEK and Blacklight that isn't still employed, and who they can pressure into doing whatever they want. BlackWatch took the bodies to a military base somewhere not long after Director McMullen signed them over to me. I suppose they had a jurisdiction issue somewhere."

Mercer's sharp gaze was on him when Ragland looked back. Inky, meanwhile, was idly swinging her feet as she sat on the stool.

"You can't hurt him, stupid." Inky said to Mercer in a dry tone. "Remember what Dana said about him."

"You used to work on Blacklight." Mercer said, ignoring her. It was no doubt an accusation.

"Not once I knew what it would do." Ragland replied. _But that didn't stop you, not until recently. What the hell happened before the outbreak that led you to betray GENTEK?_ "I was 'let go' in favor of someone who would do what they asked, but not without strings attached. I knew too much, but…"

"But it wasn't worth it to BlackWatch to kill you. You weren't a threat because you were too deeply involved to get away if their plots were revealed fully." Inky summarized blandly. "Why else would BlackWatch send plainclothes agents to go looking through your mail and have all your phone calls tapped?"

Mercer blinked. "You knew?"

"Well, Dana did say that GENTEK had Ragland under watch. All I had to do was go looking for the thugs with dead-eyed stares." Inky pointed out. "And anyway, Dr. Ragland, do you want to go to the base or do you need us to sneak the bodies over here?"

"Sneaking them out would be impossible." Mercer said after a moment. "Even with all the damage you've done to the virus detector system, there are too many soldiers who'd ask questions. And it's probably pretty far from here. Do you know which base the bodies…no, you wouldn't. Never mind."

"He's got a point. I've been trying to smuggle something much smaller out of RED CROWN since we met Greene the first time, and obviously I haven't had a whole lot of luck with it." Inky said. "It'd probably be safer to bring you to them, at least for the rest of the people who work here. At best, I could find the Penn Station bodies without help, but it would take time and something tells me we don't have that." She gave Mercer a significant look.

As Mercer sighed, Ragland thought about it. "It would probably be easiest if you just found them first, though. Then we can figure out something else."

Inky grinned suddenly at Mercer. "Well, it's what you do best, my homicidal friend." She paused, as if a thought had struck her. "Doctor, could you take a look at his shoulder before we leave? I know what it is, but I don't have a clue how to get rid of it."

But Mercer was shaking his head. "Don't. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can leave you alone."

Inky frowned briefly but didn't disagree. The grin returned in an instant. "Fine. Let's go raise hell."

* * *

"_Captain Lim!"_

"_At ease, trooper. Get on the horn and tell them we've secured the Penn Station bodies. I'm taking the heavy armor to destroy a Hive. Get control points up in this area then rendezvous with us at GENTEK."_

"_Yes sir!"_

**

* * *

**

**Diplomacy won't work on Greene, Ed. That's not how she rolls, given the city-wide clusterfuck of a situation we have going on at the moment,** the shadow-queen said idly to her minion. **And for better or, more likely, worse, Mercer doesn't know the first thing about trying to reason with her.**

**Though…it is possible if highly unlikely that I can talk a **_**human**_** opponent into fighting only Greene and the Infected for a while. It would be slightly more possible to convince Mercer to exclusively kill Infected, as well, but not while he's still pissed off about the whole parasite thing. And I still refuse to believe that anyone actually thought it was a cure for anything other than living a long and healthy life.**

Ed chirped in her mind. **I realize that, Ed, but how in hell do I try and talk General Randall around to **_**my**_** side of things? You don't get that old and that powerful without finding out what works and sticking to it, and I bet that his idea of what's a good method to stop the Infected doesn't match up with mine.**

The shadow-queen sighed. **I still think he's a bastard, but at the moment our biggest problem is still Greene, whether Mercer notices or not. She's pulling more tricks out of her hat, and you know as well as I do that I have **_**limits**_**. If I tried to pull the shit she did, I'd lose my contract and probably my heart out through my ribcage and then where would we be?**

Ed's voice was small and soft in her mind—easily ignored by anyone who couldn't control the extra sensory input from the entire information network at once. Fortunately, the shadow-queen could, even when her body was running on autopilot.

**The question is whether or not I really care enough about anyone or anything in this city to risk my own life. I've never been one for self-sacrifice. But…** A flash of all the people she knew in the city—Dana, Mercer, all of the Marines, Ragland—came to mind abruptly.** I am **_**such**_** a bleeding heart. But I still won't use it unless there's no other choice. I don't want to die before I get to go home again.**

**Well, Mercer calls. I wonder what tank-destroying mayhem he's started now?**

**Also, what do you think of the nickname "Mercy," Ed?**

Ed chirped.

**Yeah, it doesn't fit him very well. Well, I might as well get going to help him with finding the right guy among the tanks. If I sit here contemplating my bellybutton any longer I'm going to get a cramp.**

* * *

Since his time serving in the First Gulf War, Cross hadn't done much to slow down. He was nearly forty years old and had been in the service since he was a teenager, even if he had been picked to join BlackWatch by the time he turned twenty-three. His parents were long dead, he had no wife or children, and by all rights he didn't have much to live for in the civilian aspect of life.

That was fine, though. He fought every day to keep his country—his people—safe, and he did it by following their creed. _When we hunt, we kill. No one is safe; nothing is sacred. __We are BlackWatch__!__ We are the last line of defense! We will burn our own to hold the red line; it is the last line to ever hold._

He'd never been a fan of hospitals, and the medical ward of RED CROWN was no exception. It had been about a day and a half since he'd fought Mercer, and his breathing still hadn't gotten any less labored since then. While he was at least partly glad to still be alive after being unceremoniously tossed off a roof—even if he still didn't understand _why_ there would be one of those black creatures to make sure he didn't go splat against the pavement—every breath brought the pain of bone scraping against muscle. The metal bracers they'd put in during emergency surgery to keep his ribs from stabbing his lungs hadn't helped much in the pain department except to bring the pain from "indescribable" to "agony." Now he had stitches, screws, stainless steel and bits of bone floating around inside him, and all of it _burned_. He hadn't been able to report to General Randall yet and on top of everything else, managed to nearly break his ankle from landing on it wrong when he _knew_ he wasn't supposed to try to land on his feet in a situation like that and God-fucking-_damn_ it. Regardless of what Randall thought, BlackWatch had lost their best front-line fighter—possibly permanently—and Cross was sure he'd be mentally kicking himself over letting his guard down for years to come.

If he had that much time left.

He'd been too slow—he hadn't expected Mercer to pull new attacks out of his ass, especially not in the middle of a fight. For that, head nearly had his head taken off at least once.

His ribs, though…what the hell _was_ that? Cross remembered suspecting that Mercer had an accomplice, but this was probably the first time the evidence had been indisputable. The dozens of destroyed or disabled UAV and stationary virus-detectors had apparently all shorted out or something and for a while Cross had believed that. But once everything up to and including Apaches started to break down as though gummed up by wet cement, he'd begun to suspect sabotage. From the inside, of course—nothing could get into RED CROWN without identification and only then after a _long_ interrogation. It shouldn't have been possible.

He'd asked his men for a second opinion after he'd seen a black shape with glowing yellow eyes during a patrol, and they had told him that the strange creatures had been spotted all over town since Penn Station and before the Infected had come aboveground. They weren't allied with the Infected either; on numerous occasions, the Marines had brought in reports of the black creatures fighting and killing high-level Infected during nighttime patrols.

_So, __another__ faction._ And given that every one of the creatures he'd seen after that had had yellow eyes, except for the one who'd tried to kill him with a cinderblock, Cross would bet his grenade launcher that _that_ one was either the queen or a high-ranking, unique soldier. _We've got another Elizabeth Greene on our hands. Fuck._

Cross stared at the ceiling. The newest contender was on Mercer's side. It wasn't like he needed it. Hell, BlackWatch needed allies more than anyone short of the civilians, and everyone knew that no one _ever_ sided with the civilians in real life unless they were pacifists or police officers. The Marines were too ill-equipped to deal with the Infected in any role other than as BlackWatch's cannon fodder. They were dying by the hundreds every day. While BlackWatch's losses were similarly staggering, they at least could say that they were the group that was dying because a human-shaped weapon of mass destruction hated them more than anything else.

Of course, Cross felt like he should have known that no solitary superpowered mutant, even given his speed, could really be in two places at once. Could wipe out entire battalions? Sure. Could kill a Hunter, which usually killed about twenty soldiers before being pumped full of enough lead to die, in about three hits? Fine. But being in (at last count) fifteen places at once? No way. Probably half of that was just the Marines getting spooked, but there were still too many accounts of inexplicable damage or deaths. There were just so many other, more justifiable explanations that didn't mean the Vatican getting involved…

He should have _known_. The signs that there had been a second monster on Mercer's side had all been there. They'd been there since day one. _Someone_ should have put it together.

It was just like that principle he'd heard about since he was in high school. It went something like "the simplest explanation is usually the correct one." Occam's razor. Whatever it had meant in spirit, it seemed like BlackWatch was following it too closely. Maybe they needed to take lessons from the legions of paranoid intelligence agents in Mossad…

Well, he wasn't going to be able to do anything about it now. _At best_, Cross thought, _I'll be able to give a report to Randall and he'll find someone to take over for me while I end up leaving Manhattan or else die here… _He sighed, or tried to. _Damn it._

He needed to talk to General Randall soon, but wasn't sure if he'd be able to. Randall's mood over the last few days had best been described as thunderous, so it was no time to go bothering him with anything trivial. On a related note, Cross also felt that, at the moment, there was no amount of morphine that would get him off the cot and back into a semi-normal routine. Unless Randall deigned to enter the medical ward and visit him, that was that.

The ceiling started to spin. Cross raised and arm and rubbed his eyes. _Shit, hallucinations starting in three, two, one…_

It didn't seem like all that long after when Cross heard someone say above his head, "There's no need to stand at attention, Captain. Just stay down."

Cross's eyes snapped open and he wheezed, "Yes, sir."

Randall sat back. "Your report, Captain?"

_Fuck you. You want me to do this __**now**__?_ "Yes, sir." Cross said tightly. "ZEUS was successfully injected with the Cure."

"Good." Randall said, and Cross bit back the first three things he was about to say. He hadn't had a chance to go over the casualty report yet, but given that he was the only one of his squad apparently still breathing, that meant that he had lost _everyone_. Just…just _damn_ it. "And your injuries are a result of ZEUS's attacks?"

"No, sir." Cross said carefully. "ZEUS was debilitated by the device's injection. However, there was a…ZEUS had an ally, sir. She appeared and attacked shortly after my radio transmission."

Randall's expression darkened. "She?"

"Not MOTHER." Cross said quickly. "Whatever it was, it's the leader of the black monsters the troops have been reporting. I've seen them, too."

"I see. What did you observe about it?" Randall demanded.

"I did observe that this one had blue eyes instead of yellow, which most likely marks the leader." Cross said. "As with all of them, its body wasn't well-defined, but its covering had already started to evaporate. It appears to be human underneath."

"Understood. Continue."

"Yes, sir. The subject had the ability to grasp faraway objects and used them as weapons, as well as appear in an area completely undetected, all within three seconds. Whatever it is, it's much more subtle than ZEUS. Also, given that it chose to attack me rather than ZEUS as an Infected would, I assume it's not one of them and is ZEUS's ally over ours. Since it decided to yell 'Hey chucklehead' in a high, feminine voice while trying to kill me, I also surmised that it was both female and as intelligent as a human."

Randall nodded stiffly. "Good work, Captain." The old general stood up.

"Thank you, sir." Cross managed to say. He returned to staring at the ceiling and paused. "Sir?"

"Yes, Captain?"

"While this could be the result of a morphine-induced hallucination," Cross said, "there seems to be one of the creatures on the ceiling right now."

Cross didn't see General Randall draw his gun and shoot at the little black thing, but he did see it fly into a panic and start trying to crawl out a window. Finally, one of Randall's shots connected and it exploded into smoke.

Halfway across town, the shadow-queen jerked to attention in the middle of watching Mercer's back from the rooftops and started swearing loudly.

* * *

"_Sir, Director McMullen surrendered the Penn Station bodies to a civilian."_

"_Ragland."_

"_You did the right thing, son. Your new orders are this: recover ALL samples, bodies and evidence from Dr. Ragland. Bring them to Base AE-One."_

"_Ragland?"_

"_If he doesn't interfere, leave him be. He's already implicated. He won't talk."_

"_And McMullen, sir?"_

"_It's time for the doctor to learn who's in charge of this little excursion."_

Alex sat down on the rooftop, blinking rapidly and feeling his shoulder burn. Jesus, he could already see the world starting to spin and spin and _spin_…

Inky grabbed his hand and pulled him along until he remembered how to run.

**

* * *

**

This is bad.

Mercer was so far "out of it" that he couldn't have found stability with a compass and a waterproof map. He was almost completely out of his mind with pain and something close to delirium, but he kept going even though she was sure if she let go of his hand he'd wander into a ditch and drown in a puddle or something.

**I underestimated it.**

He didn't even seem to know who she was anymore, only that she could be followed. In fact, if she wasn't imagining things, it seemed like he actually weighed less than she remembered. She shouldn't have been able of pulling Mercer along anywhere he didn't already want to go unless something had drastically changed. His regenerative abilities had been heavily taxed, but not so much that…oh.

**He's going to drop any second now. There's nothing left.**

The shadow-queen grimaced and kept going, trying to push her doubts away. She was about to summon Kafka or one of her other hounds to help her force him to keep up as they ran along the rooftops, but she knew it wasn't going to work. Between the sun and the possibility that he'd lash out at anything new, she decided the risk was too high.

Regarding his current state, though, he'd apparently been shot so many times that he'd regenerated at the absolute baseline for someone his size. Instead of cracking the cement where he landed, he probably would just go splat if he tried his rooftop landing trick now.

They made it to within a block of the hospital before Mercer's disguise started to waver.

**Oh, fucking **_**hell**_**, not now! Keep it together just for another block…**

It was still daylight. There was no way her minions would be able to act now.

"Pick up the pace, sunshine," she whispered in his ear. "Only a little more before Ragland can start working on you."

It seemed to do the trick. At least, he seemed to summon reserves of energy from somewhere and made his way to the hospital in a something approaching a straight line. **Close enough.**

All she could really say after that was that at least no one died. She dragged him along by his unresisting hand as his endurance started to waver again. At the very, very least, he didn't blow his cover, either; she managed to run the last fifty years to the elevator and shove him inside before his control slipped completely. He hit the floor, coughing loudly.

She knelt next to him, snapping her fingers in front of his face. Nothing. **No reaction. Tunnel vision? Is he blind?**

The elevator opened after entirely too long and Alex seemed to spring to life, somewhat, and begin to stagger toward the morgue.

He leaned forward as the swinging doors flew open under his weight and reached the sink in a scant second. The shadow-queen froze momentarily—**What the **_**hell**_**?**—and then she heard him give a racking cough that sounded so much like a tuberculosis one that she had to move.

In an instant she was at his side and blanched at the red stain in the sink. **You've **_**got**_** to be shitting me. Is it eating his lungs?** She thumped him on the back once, twice, and he spat out blood mixed with saliva and the mucus that always seemed to build up when someone managed to get sick, no matter what with. He was shaking.

"You okay now?" the shadow-queen asked quietly, gently prying his hands away from the sink. Mercer nearly collapsed against her, but managed to grab a table to steady himself. She eyed the growth on his shoulder that marked the "Cure" and just sighed. **You only outweigh me by fifty pounds now. If you wanted to just fall over now, I wouldn't drop you.**

Mercer coughed again and didn't answer for a moment. He still seemed slightly dazed. "I…where's Ragland?" He swayed.

"Don't know," she replied, searching for a basin that didn't have a brain in it. **Fucking morgues.** "I can go get—"

Mercer hissed suddenly, clutching his shoulder as the pain flared again. She caught his arm and tried to steady him, but it didn't seem to be working. "N-no time," he said through gritted teeth. He threw his head back and howled, "RAGLAND!"

And it _was_ a howl; a frantic, panicked animal sound that shook the lights and echoed even in a place too small for it.

Then, as if that effort was the tipping point, Alex swayed for a moment before collapsing in a heap. He would have hit the ground and possibly cracked his newly-fragile head open, too, if she hadn't been there to catch him.

"Note to self, unconscious people are heavier than conscious ones," the shadow-queen said with a groan. Trying to avoid irritating his shoulder _thing_ more than it already had been, she moved his limp head down from her neck and tried to think of a slightly more convenient way of getting him onto a table to sleep it off. **Damn it, I didn't ask for this. And while I probably can't say it aloud with a straight face, I don't think anyone deserves to be eaten alive from the inside out. It's like that documentary on wasps.**

She looked down at him and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. **You'd never want Dana to see you like this. She'd be worried sick and probably try to punch me. Or you.**

**How would she react if I told her that her precious big brother's already died once? Twice, both before he learned how to kill?**

**You shouldn't be alive. But if you weren't…** She thought of when she had first seen the younger Mercer sibling, through the eyes of her beasts, and the BlackWatch trooper that had been preparing to splatter her skull all over her own apartment. **But if you were dead, I would have never saved her. She owes you her life.**

Ragland stumbled into the morgue a moment later, looking bewildered. He also looked surprised to see them back so soon, and the shadow-queen narrowed her eyes at the possibility that he thought their being on the floor together counted as a "compromising position."

Instead, the redhead opened her mouth and said flatly. "Get over here and help me move him, will you? And if you say anything about the _fucking_ Pieta, I swear I'll find a way to make your life even more of a living hell than it is now."

* * *

"Okay, Ed, try that again." Dana said, holding a plastic microwaveable container over her head. She waved it rapidly back and forth.

Ed gave a trill of excitement and his yellow eyes glowed briefly. He bounced up and down and his tiny arms lengthened into whips, one of which cracked against the container and slapped it out of her grip. Dana grinned even though it spun off into the gloom and knocked a picture frame off the bedside table. Oh well. It wasn't hers, anyway.

"Good. That's what…three attacks?" Dana and Ed had been practicing ever since Inky and Alex had left the previous day. Allowing for breaks for naps, meals, and the all-important bathroom, Dana had been trying nearly constantly to see all that Ed could do.

So far they had discovered whips, spikes, and claws.

The whip was the most recent—it had been an accident, but Dana had been sitting between Ed and a can of cat food, and the little monster had apparently decided it wasn't worth the effort to go around her normally and had just lassoed the can with one stretched-out arm that had nearly hit Dana in the face. After Ed had eaten, Dana had immediately gotten to work in trying to get him to practice. So far, they had managed to get him to hit small objects with enough force to propel them into the bedroom wall twelve feet away, but every third time he seemed to accidentally hit the coffee table and leave a long scratch in the wood. Every time that had happened so far, Dana just sighed and asked him to try again.

The spikes were not an accident, however. They had been the product of a bored day watching videos online, and she had been inspired by seeing police-placed spike strips ripping open a car's tires in a dozen places. And, after a moment of watching Ed rip open a can with his huge teeth, she'd decided that the world needed car-seeking spike strips. Or something. Dana was sure that a night without sleep had had something to do with it, too.

The claws had been built-in, but the ability to slice carrots with them was Dana's idea.

After practice, Dana and Ed lay on the bed, though Dana had decided to put her feet on the pillow and leave her head hanging off the end of the bed. "I wonder where Alex is. What's he doing now?"

Ed cooed.

"I wish I could say I knew what was going on." Dana said after a minute. "Just a hint. It's all I need."

Ed made a noncommittal noise and settled himself deeper into the pillow Dana had liberated from the couch.

"It's just…Alex used to be so cold, you know," she said quietly. Ed seemed to be listening. "After Mom…I always thought he ran away. But he'd come back, eventually. He's nine years older than me. I thought he would be like a superhero when I saw him again, or something. Just better than he was.

"And…and he wasn't. Maybe. I don't really know. Nothing makes any sense anymore." Dana sighed, crossing her arms behind her head. "He just dropped in out of the blue, saying he needed a favor and telling me all sorts of stories. Now he can't remember anything.

"We were never close. Not really. He'd help sometimes if I got in trouble, but he lost the fights he used to get in. He wasn't very big back then. Still isn't." Dana paused. "Why am I even telling this to you? It's not like you'll keep a secret if you can think, and if you can't this is pointless."

Ed didn't respond except to burrow further into the pillow.

"Everything's changed now." Dana murmured.

Ed yawned.

Dana sighed and rolled over onto her side. _I hope those two take care of each other out there._

* * *

Doctor Richard Friedenson sighed as he snapped his rubber gloves on. This was probably the sixth unidentified corpse to be wheeled in since five in the morning. Granted, most of them tended to be shot to so many pieces that the cause of death couldn't be determined unless someone provided him and his entire department with a time machine. And others wouldn't be wheeled in to him, instead being just burned on the street in huge bonfires or left out in the street to rot. Ten days since the start of the Infected invasion, and there'd been almost no progress so far.

The most recent had apparently died without a mark on him. His clothes had been packed away to be disposed of later, but they had discovered his name from the wallet in his back pocket.

Dmitri Alfroskaya, age 25, probably just an unlucky tourist. Oddly enough, he had also been carrying a bag with someone else's identification in it, but the red-haired woman in the photo could have been anyone and in any case didn't match the description of anyone in their morgue.

Friedenson looked over at his assistant, Louis James, and said, "Would you mind handing me the 8-inch blade, James? It looks like organ damage this time."

James nodded and disappeared momentarily to go find the scalpels. Friedenson shook his head. Why did GENTEK insist on letting their men get in here and misplace everything? He ran the morgue quite carefully, but it seemed like every time he turned around someone put his supplies back the wrong way. To normal people it would probably involve losing house keys. Sometimes Friedenson wondered if someone, somewhere, would manage to lose the code for a nuclear missile.

James returned in about a minute and Friedenson sighed, because this was the part where they discovered if it really was a dead man on their table. Usually BlackWatch made sure a corpse was, in fact, dead, usually by putting a bullet through his or her head. They hadn't this time, which usually meant they'd just dragged this one back like a cat carrying home a bird.

"Okay, going in through the torso—have the bolt cutters on standby, James. And _in_—" This was about when everything went straight to hell. Blood welled from the incision and, before Friedenson could even yell, "Well, _shit_!" the situation had changed.

The supposed "corpse" didn't sit up like they were supposed to in the movies. Instead, what had once been Dmitri Alfroskaya stared up at them both for a moment, his green eyes dull and unfocused—and suddenly James collapsed soundlessly, blood spurting from where his left eye used to be. There was a scalpel sticking out of it and Friedenson didn't remember seeing anyone's hand move. The little wheeled stand and the sink nearby started to rattle.

And then the once-Dmitri erupted—there was no other way to describe it. One moment he was lying down contemplating the ceiling with an air of dispassion, and the next instant he was up and moving and Friedenson was already running away in a panic, screaming at the top of his lungs. He'd heard about the pathologists who had been present when ZEUS had first appeared. He had no intention of ending up dead.

He never had a choice. The bolt cutters caught him in the back of the head and kept hitting him long after his body had stopped twitching.

The "corpse" turned to look at the camera from under his bangs. His eyes glowed briefly and the image cut out.

**

* * *

**

**A/N:** Plot lines…oy… Also, thank you to everyone who reviewed and, to Agusta, I'm glad you like Inky.

Sorry about the wait and the shortness, but there's a lot going on now and I lost all the files on my computer (_again_). Fucking trojans.


	9. Blackout

**Chapter Nine: Blackout**

**A/N: **In which Inky discovers the problems with bureaucracy and not managing manpower, Alex discovers that there is indeed someone who thinks of him as a friend, and Cross wonders why the hell he didn't leave when his tour was up the _first_ time.

* * *

Alex knew he was in trouble. That wasn't really the problem. The problem was that Inky was acting weirder than she normally did and that prospect _might_ have terrified him a little. At least her insanity was consistent. With her, he never had to worry if she got offended or disgusted by his actions because, frankly, she seemed to find massacring Infected to be the most entertaining thing in the world when she didn't have to be the one doing it. And whenever he killed ordinary humans, she brushed it off without much of a problem.

He hadn't wondered about that much before, but now he was starting to worry that he should have.

Unlike Karen and Dana, she mostly lectured him on taking unnecessary risks. Karen hadn't apparently cared, and Dana hadn't known, but the redhead was always insistent on it. She didn't care about moral considerations like a civilian would, only a risks-versus-gain axis that apparently formed the core of her motivations. If the risk was too great or she didn't stand to gain enough, she would ignore whatever anyone else said.

The part of him that was formed from the minds of dead BlackWatch soldiers insisted that she was no ordinary woman. This was the sort of thought that made Alex want to respond with extreme sarcasm, but he wasn't ever sure who to direct it to. Himself? "Them"? He wasn't sure anymore if there was a difference.

And now he was driving an armored personnel carrier for the fourth time that week, with Dr. Ragland and Inky also inside. If it weren't for the fact that he'd already driven Karen Parker halfway across the city in one, it would have been a much more awkward ride than it already was. Ragland didn't talk much, tactfully avoiding mention of how Alex had collapsed less than two hours ago in the morgue. Inky didn't say anything either and it was such a change from how she usually filled the air with meaningless syllables that he was actually slightly worried.

One of the voices in his head decided to pipe up then and, before Alex could figure out how to get it to shut up, he found himself saying, "Inky, why did you decide to help me?" He immediately squashed the impulse to ask something else.

"Hm…? Oh, that. Well…" He nearly heard her shrug. "I wanted to."

"Really." Alex said with all due sarcasm. The APC ran over a taxi and barely twitched, though metal screamed under its treads.

"Pretty much." Inky replied mildly. This time Alex apparently misread a cue and they ended up driving over the top of a one-way only sign. "And your driving sucks."

"I never did get time to practice with these." Alex snapped.

"I can't imagine why not." Inky said. "Anyway, I made the decision to help you destroy what we both hated. I knew that if you didn't manage to kill yourself doing something stupid within two hours of fleeing GENTEK that first night, we'd probably end up working together despite not ever meeting formally. Just not as closely."

"Someone we both hated?" Alex guessed. _And up and over—is that a school bus? Shit._

"I have personal reasons for wanting GENTEK gutted and will probably come up with a few more by the time we get to McMullen." Inky said. "None of it has to do with you, but it's collateral damage I don't mind causing."

Alex didn't even have to think on that much. The BlackWatch voices were prodding at him again. They, out of all the voices in his head, were the loudest. It probably had to do with fanaticism. "I assume you work for yet another shadowy organization in the middle of Fuck-If-I-Know, Virginia, then?" _Not as if they needed the competition, though. So, what is it? CIA? Something worse?_

"Not even close." Inky replied, a laugh in her voice. "But I knew about BlackWatch and probably half their history before the quarantine, which may tell you something."

"That you're the sneakiest bitch I think I'll ever meet?" Alex suggested. "I wouldn't put it past you to break into Fort Dietrich and steal half their records for some light reading." _Why is it getting easier to just…chat with her? It's like I know her better than I do…or I've met her before._ But that was stupid. Of _course_ he'd met her before—he hadn't been able to get rid of her for a week straight_. But…_

But it felt like he'd known her for far longer. He had to be told his own name, and the first time he met his sister after waking up in the morgue felt like the first time he had ever met his sister. But for some reason, she seemed familiar somehow. And that disturbed him. The only other time he could remember feeling that sort of familiarity was with another highly dangerous woman.

Elizabeth Greene.

Alex buried the thought almost automatically—_No, I am __**not**__ going to think about this __**now**__ of all times_. _Not now_.

"Well, that too." Inky said, apparently not noticing the pause at all. "I picked up most of it by osmosis and by tracking their movements all over the country whenever they were deployed." _And yet you thought it was a good idea not to share any of this with me. What the hell?_

"How long did you follow them around?" Alex asked, trying to avoid a group of BlackWatch soldiers who suddenly decided to leap in front of the APC and be popped like balloons under its treads. He had no explanation or comment for it, and made a mental note to never mention this to Dana. When even the _exterminators_ were attempting suicide (and succeeding), the situation has long since gone to hell.

"…Six years, not counting the time I spent monitoring them from a nice, safe office on another continent before being sent here." Inky said after a moment. "I was forced to give up after I lost all my information and supplies nine years ago."

"How did that happen?" Alex asked distractedly, because now people were shooting at the rogue APC and neither of his passengers seemed to have noticed_. God __**damn**__ tank crews and helicopters_. He kept driving, speeding up until the lone APC was like an unstoppable engine of death by crushing. _Hang on one damn minute. She spent __**fifteen years**__ hanging around in this country? What the hell did she do before?_

"Got caught in a collapsing building while trying to assassinate an office drone with a pen." Inky said. She got up and peeked over his shoulder at the dozen soldiers already firing recklessly at the APC even if they were standing directly in front of it. "It seems like we're getting close."

"Probably." Alex said. Irritated, he decided to take the shortest route to their destination—namely, by going right over the guard post and flattening anyone inside. From there it was just a short, panicked jaunt into the building. Since it already seemed to be two seconds from being completely overrun by Infected anyway, Alex didn't see how the military would be able to do much to stop them.

"I hope this is the right place." Inky muttered as all three of them scrambled out of the hatch with Infected all around. She reached the door first—Alex was momentarily distracted by monsters and swung at a bulky Infected, caving its skull in to the sound of cracking eggshells. "Hey, mind giving a girl and an old man a little help here?"

Inky and Ragland had to scramble out of the way as Alex swung backwards and the steel-plated door was ripped free of its frame by the force of it. They all hurried inside—there was no point to continuing to fight off waves of Infected out where the military might see them.

The inside of the building was painted red with blood and Infected matter that marked Infected zones. There was no one inside, but that didn't mean there hadn't been. Inky stooped and picked up a severed finger. Alex looked up and thought he saw a body—or bits of one—dangling among the ceiling supports. Weapons were strewn everywhere and Alex thought of the huge crates of ammunition and firearms present in the other military bases he'd seen. Other than that, and the tiny area shielded by Plexiglas and steel, the base was like a Hive with its Infected troops all out to lunch.

"Bodies over _there_…" Inky was mumbling, and then she looked at Alex and said calmly, "Guard Ragland. This place looks like the Infected got here first and gutted the whole damn building without the guards knowing. I can take the first wave as long as the roof holds." Already her minions were fitting the door back into place, jamming it into the frame if necessary.

Alex glanced at the roof in question, which looked, in his opinion, rather weak. It certainly wouldn't hold his weight in places, and he knew from experience that Hunters outweighed him by quite a bit. "That isn't going to hold if a Hunter gets up there." He picked up a discarded rifle and pulled a dead man's hand out of it.

"I know that." Inky said, frustrated. "But even large-caliber rifle slugs don't work that well on Hunters. And if you try using a rocket launcher in here _someone's_ going to get killed by the blowback."

Alex glanced back—Ragland had already entered the Plexiglas-shielded room and was looking over the bodies with interest. "Probably not. There are only three of us in here, and if Ragland stays in there he's mostly safe. It's just between you and me."

Inky sighed. "Fine. But you know that if one of those linebacker-type ones gets in your face you're going to spend a lot of time getting blown up by proxy, right?"

Alex rolled one shoulder, still wary of the other. It hadn't flared in a while, though. He just hoped it could stay as harmless tissue for a bit longer. "I'll be fine."

Inky gave him a considering look and said, "Be careful, Alex. Otherwise Dana is going to bite my head off."

As she walked away to start lecturing her minions in who-knew-what, Alex blinked. _She did it again. She used my name._ Then he shook his head at the thought and went to go find a rocket launcher. The assault rifle wouldn't cut it this time.

At the same time, the first of the Hunters returned by smashing a hole in the roof and dropping through, only to find intruders in its lair. It charged and knocked Alex flat.

* * *

RED CROWN was in a panic. That was the only way to describe it.

Cross could move, now, but not very well. At least his leg was responsive now and he could almost start breathing normally—or he would have, were it not for the fact that the steel inserts didn't mean his ribs were healed and the morphine dosage he'd been given wasn't quite sufficient to leave him pain-free, because a sufficient dosage for him would have amounted to what would kill someone else. They couldn't afford to have him unresponsive or hallucinating for too long, though he had heard the medics complaining that having someone with genetic modification in the ward was a pain in the ass. While Cross agreed privately, it was more for his sake than for theirs. He still hated hospitals.

Either way, it didn't really matter now. He was bruised from armpit to hip on one side and nothing but a week's worth of rest would make a dent in that, especially on top of everything else. Sometimes, though, he didn't have that time and he'd die before he sat aside and watched his entire team get slaughtered…again.

He sat on the cot he'd been assigned, with his spark rod within easy reach, and then he waited.

From the sound of the screaming, he wouldn't have to wait for very long.

Cross could already see the blood splattering the floor outside the open door. One of the medics, untrained in the art of staying alive in the face of Infected attacks, was already dead on the floor just outside. He probably never even knew what hit him.

Suddenly, one of the bulkiest soldiers Cross had ever seen barreled through the opposite door, charging straight for the other end of the area—that was where the screaming was the loudest. He was huge—eight or more feet tall, bulging muscles all barely kept inside the white uniform of an officer and steel bindings all along his spine. Just from looking at him, Cross knew who he was.

One of the new weapons. Redlight variant DX-1120 mutated BlackWatch soldiers, colloquially referred to as supersoldiers by civilians and Marines or "D-Codes" by the men. Oh yes, Cross knew who they were. They were what, had he been born twenty years later, he could have become. They had to be young—most of BlackWatch wouldn't have survived the massive invasive surgery that gave them resistance to bullets even without armor by putting the armor plates under their skin, not even with twice the recommended dosage of the mutagen. There just wasn't enough growth left in their skeletons to deal with that. A lot of the early ones died under the knife.

But if you got them young enough, you could make monsters.

If you didn't, there were always people like Cross, who were slightly enhanced but not overly so, who had a higher chance of surviving clashes with the Infected. They died like humans, but for a while they could be more than that. They could fight anything the Infected could throw at them, toe to toe. They were the Wiseman team.

Or rather, they _had been_. Cross was fairly sure that the rest of his team had died under Mercer's claws. Now he was both the oldest member of the team, and, as of two days ago, the last.

There weren't many of the modified soldiers, of either type. There never really had been. The Wiseman team had only ever had about twenty members at once because the death toll was rather high even at the best of times, and it was hard to find soldiers willing to give up any chance at a normal life while undergoing drastic surgery and gene therapy, even in BlackWatch.

Maybe, with a "human" opponent running loose in Mercer, they were getting more applicants. Loose Runners always seemed to inspire fanaticism.

The D-Code rounded the corner. He was about to say something, probably a warning call or a taunt, and then something much smaller hit him at top speed. The D-Code's uniform began dripping red—whatever this new Infected was, it was red, smaller than average, and apparently had claws and teeth and no problem with using them.

There was a lot of gurgling. The D-Code was trying to pry the newcomer's teeth from his throat, but it wasn't working. Cross, still stunned, watched as the D-Code tried to break his opponent's back in a bear hug, only to have the monster jerk once, sharply.

Blood splattered the wall. It was a lot faster than Mercer. _Reaction time sped up by a factor of three_, Cross thought blankly as it turned to face him. _Male. About twenty years of age. Naked, breathing heavily. Covered in blood and panting, but not slowed. Shit, what is that thing?_

He wasn't mutated as far as Cross could tell—Infected always looked like twisted mimicries of whatever they had once been. This person was, well, normal. Aside from the blood and apparently having all the tact of a rabid animal.

Cross grabbed his shock prod and waited for the enemy's next move.

The two of them stared at each other for a long moment. Eventually, Cross saw the other man tilt his head a little, almost like a curious dog. "Я…потерялся."

Cross blinked. "What?" _Okay_… Infected couldn't talk, either. Even if he didn't recognize the language, he did know that the other man was trying to communicate. That was a point in his favor, though the dead staff and soldiers were definitely not. Why he had decided to attempt to talk to Cross of all people was slightly lost on him, though.

There was a longer staring contest. Then, without warning, the blood-covered mutant simply folded up in place with a sigh and fell to the ground, unconscious and knocking a bedside tray over on the way down, just as the assault team arrived. Cross was left staring in bewilderment at the place the strange psycho been standing, even as the heavily-armed and armored team dragged him away.

_I'm getting too old for this shit._

* * *

"How are you holding up?" Inky shouted from the ceiling as Alex ducked a Hunter's vicious swing and was promptly bowled over by two Walkers who jumped him at the same time. A moment later, Alex reappeared from under the flailing limbs, launching a Walker skyward with one punch and sending it through the ceiling.

The shadow-queen sent one long tentacle out and grabbed the Hunter's neck as it was about to go for the kill, hurling it through the air into another nest of her minions, who pounced and instantly tore into it. Alex couldn't help but think that she was cheating somehow by using her shadow armor continuously.

Alex kicked the last of the Walkers off and ran, scooping up a grenade launcher as he went. Behind him, Inky was sweeping up the Walkers that had managed to get around him and mashing them into bloody pulp in her grasp. He noticed, though, that she hadn't moved from her place on the ceiling, and he found himself wondering why even as he pointed the business end of the weapon directly at a Hunter that had just landed on the floor in front of him.

The air was flooded with smoke and heat as the explosive-tipped ammunition left the barrel, smashing into the beast and slashing it with shrapnel and fire even as Alex fired again. The Hunter roared and screamed, lashing out blindly as Alex's second rocket struck it in the face, blasting part of its thick skull away and leaving its sensory…organs exposed. Blood went everywhere.

But the black creatures under Inky's command didn't need to see to fight, and if they did they could see past smoke easily. They leapt on it and one even managed to burrow into the Hunter's exposed brain. There were a series of horrible squelching sounds as they chewed it to bits from the inside out—they apparently enjoyed eating softer internal organs before getting down to the bare bones.

Alex decided not to think about it too much and concentrated on killing the Infected in front of him.

For a while it was like they fell into a rhythm. It was Inky on the ceiling and Alex on the ground, with her snatching up anything he couldn't kill quickly enough and him scything Infected down with any weapon he could get his hands on. She worked easily around him; without pause, she never allowed her minions too close to his line of fire and deftly abandoned anything he'd already splattered across the room in a trail of gore.

That didn't mean they had it down perfectly, though. He missed a Hunter once, twice in a row and then the grenade launcher was out of ammo. And unfortunately it was a lot faster than Inky or her minions. Swinging one massive gorilla-like arm, it knocked him through the air until he smashed into a wall. Dazed for a moment, Alex stumbled when he tried to get to his feet immediately. Meanwhile the beast was already moving on to its true goal.

"ALEX!" Ragland screamed—the Hunter was trying to pound its way past the Plexiglas barrier and, given the six of it and what he knew of Plexiglas, it would succeed shortly. "Jesus, get these things away from me!"

"Got it!" One of Inky's black tentacles shot toward it and curled around its rear left foot, flinging it toward the opposite wall. Alex grabbed another projectile weapon (he didn't care what type) and shot it in midair, and it exploded into a rain of blood and bone.

Still, Alex tossed the empty weapon aside and retreated to defend Ragland while Inky brought a particularly thick black tendril to bear and smashed ten Infected flat. Blood spurted everywhere, but it didn't seem to deter the legions of Infected behind that.

"Hey, you know what?" Inky's voice echoed from somewhere on a wall.

"What?" Alex asked, rising to the bait because he couldn't see any option for attack other than yet more grenade launchers—and he _hated_ getting plowed by shrapnel—or trying to beat a Hunter to death with his bare hands, which was suicidal even for him.

Inky seemed to laugh. "Hold still."

Alex glanced back and there was a gigantic, nearly-spherical black creature to either side of him. Each had a mouth almost as large as its entire body and filled with long silver teeth the size of his arm. There didn't seem to be enough head left for much of a brain, and each had six wavering yellow eyes that twitched or faded erratically. They had stumpy legs—eight per monster—with four on each side that barely lifted them off the ground, and flat, club-like tails that apparently were only used to weigh them down. If he had to guess, he'd say that they were walking stomachs with all the worst characteristics of crocodiles, hippos, and elephant seals, with a mouth-span of about fifteen feet.

"What the hell are these things?" Alex demanded as they moved forward, past him and toward the Infected, who all of a sudden didn't seem so eager to charge.

"These are my newest creations. I call them Big Gulps." Inky's silver teeth flashed. "You might say they're my answer to anything and everything."

The fat creatures continued their slow march unopposed. Alex stared. "They're _slow_. The Infected _walk_ faster than that. How the hell do you plan to—?"

As if on cue (and Alex didn't doubt that she'd been waiting for him to say something like that), the bulky creatures opened their huge jaws and each sent a long, black tongue out to grasp and reel in the nearest Hunter.

"Not so useless now, are they?" Inky said to Alex's stunned silence. She reappeared next to him, still jet-black in her shadow-armored form and Alex refocused on her rather than watching the Hunters dying painfully in the shadow monsters' jaws. "But be careful. They're not designed for open assault, only ambush and they can't fight at close range."

"Why are you telling me this?" he asked, trying to keep up.

Inky looked at him, her diamond-shaped blue facsimiles of eyes blinking in and out of existence. Then the layer of armor over her head peeled back a bit, revealing her real face. She was frowning. "Why shouldn't I? It's what friends _do_. Friends don't let friends get killed for stupid reasons like not enough info."

_Friends?_

"I mean, I don't feel like telling you things about my past because it's not really relevant and kind of embarrassing, and you sure don't tell me some things about yourself, either. That's okay." Inky went on, not noticing his reaction or not caring. "But you can't keep potentially life-threatening things from people you want to spend time with. It's rude and pretty much makes it impossible to keep any friends."

Alex could only laugh humorlessly. Inky blinked. He shook his head and said, "You're so fucking insane."

She grinned and the shadow-armor slid into place again. "The world's gone insane already! I'll be in good company. Besides, you're the only person I know who can fire a grenade launcher while doing a backflip. Doesn't that tell you something?"

The Big Gulps were handily dismantling the Infected from a range of about fifty feet. There wasn't much to do but watch until Ragland finished doing whatever he'd come her e to do. It seemed to be raining limbs. They spent several minutes doing nothing but hanging back and waiting for Ragland to announce that he was done.

Of course, it just so happened that when he _did_, Infected started storming the building. _Again_.

Alex and Inky made short work of the bulky Walkers the second time around, since there were no Hunters as backup and assault rifles worked perfectly well.

Then there was a terrible roar and something long, red, and huge exploded out of the center of the ground, punching a hole through concrete and infected biomass all at once. It was probably about sixty feet long and as thick as a tree trunk, and Alex knew just from looking at it that it would be a problem. The three-pronged bone-white of the tentacle looked, frankly, like it could punch through armor just as easily as concrete.

"…That's not good." Alex said after a moment.

"Good to know I planned for it, then." Inky replied. She waved her arm and the Big Gulps abruptly changed targets from the common Infected to the new one. "Gamma, Delta, target acquired. Rip it out of the ground." She turned back to Alex. "You're the only one who knows how to drive an APC. Get Ragland out of here and I'll meet you back at the hospital once I finish up here."

Alex couldn't help but feel like he was being sidelined. Not all that long ago, they would have done the exact opposite, with Alex standing his ground and Inky running people back and forth. He knew he could survive nearly anything that could possibly be thrown at him and he had, but he wasn't so sure about the redhead who always seemed to weasel her way out of things.

Inky smiled faintly. "Don't worry. I'll be fine. Just get Ragland back to the hospital and we'll see what we can do about getting you back to normal."

* * *

**Hey, Ed. I think I have a clue to work off of.**

Ed trilled through their mental link. The last note was a high one, indicating a question.

**Ha-fucking-ha. I don't need any lip from you, can-opener. Anyway, did anyone go with Mercer when he went to see Parker?**

Ed trilled again, this time without changing the tone to his mental voice.

**Vonnegut did? Damn, I haven't seen him in forever.** The shadow-queen sighed as Gamma and Delta feasted on what was left of the monstrous tentacle. Elsewhere, her other Big Gulps were hunting down and chewing on as many of the strange structures as they could find. She knew the tentacles were just an extension of Greene's infection, not individuals. Maybe that was why she felt so annoyed by the lack of progress. **Well, anyway, that means he's been in contact with her, however briefly. Set him and a few of his pack to tracking her down.**

Ed sent a silent question to his mistress, confused. What could the yellow-haired woman even do?

**It's not what she can do. It's what she **_**represents**_** that's important.** The shadow-queen ascended to the ceiling again, where she could hide from the light. **I don't know much about her, but for a while she had Mercer on a leash. She's the past. What in hell is in Mercer's past? He doesn't remember jack, but I think it might be the most important part of this citywide puzzle.**

**Just from looking at what I know, though…** She sighed. **Mercer's not human. No human survives the shit he did before I got to him, or what happened after. But he is at the center of this whole mess, and while BlackWatch dumping the blame on him seemed like just looking for a scapegoat…well. There's something weird going on here. Besides the zombie apocalypse, of course.**

**There are only a few places to get information like that. One is Greene, and I'll politely say "Fuck that" to arranging a meeting with her. Her brain's literally in a million places and a million pieces at once. I wouldn't be able to get anything coherent out of her and I'd run the risk of getting infected with whatever superbug she's coming up with now.**

**The second choice is the military. For obvious reasons—not including a certain level of technological superiority—I don't want to get them stirred up. Besides, they probably know about me by now. It'd be safer to lie low for a few days so they don't feel like they have to come up with a counterattack or something.**

**Third choice…well, I'd like to be able to ask Parker, if only because it's likely that she's being held in witness protection or something similar and it's easier to get past **_**that**_** than it is to take on RED CROWN entirely alone. I could corner her easily…** The shadow-queen frowned. **But I have to find her first. **

Ed made a concerned noise. He followed it with a series of clicks.

**Well, fuck. Bat, too? What the hell was he doing?** The shadow-queen reached into her swarm's collective memory and pulled out a wisp of what might have been Bat a few hours previous. She replayed its tiny mind twice to make sure she had caught all of the details.

Ed whimpered.

**Are you kidding me? How the fuck did Cross survive that? I knocked him off a fucking six-story building!** the shadow-queen mentally screeched as a Hunter tried to reach her from the floor of the abandoned military base. She backhanded it with a twenty-foot black tentacle. _**What the hell is going on here?**_

She turned her attention to Ed, bewildered and furious. **WELL?**

Ed gurgled something.

**What do you **_**mean**_** I…!** She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. **I **_**realize**_** I was blinded by anger, Ed. It doesn't change the fact that I wanted him dead. Why did you decide to save him?**

Ed trilled.

…**You have a point. Fine. If the Parker thing doesn't pan out or I run out of patience, I'll go see what I can do in RED CROWN. Keep your eyes on Dana. Don't let anything happen to her.**

Ed nodded.

"Ed, what are you doing?" Dana asked.

Ed said nothing. He couldn't talk anyway, and there was no point in letting his ward in on the fact that she was constantly under surveillance. Not really. Then Ed forgot about everything that involved words larger than one syllable and dove for the can of cat food she was holding, content to be a pet.

* * *

Somewhere deep in the dark heart of the city of Manhattan, something primal moved among the legions of Redlight-infected. Unlike the warmth and occasional flares of common emotions among humans, there was nothing here but a fierce, razor-edged urge. It was the urge to fight, to defend, and to create.

Fight the horrible, simple-minded creatures that strike down your brothers and sisters. Defend the Great Mother. Create more of her children for her to lavish with praise and shield in her fierce joy.

Like with any family with many children, though, there was always one that went off to do its own thing and become a thorn in its mother's side. At the moment, the hundreds of minds within her hold screamed about _that_ one. Oh, she'd _tried_ to send her children to discipline the wild one, to get him to return to her fold, but nothing seemed to be working. Every time she asked nicely, he'd rip his siblings limb from limb and, occasionally, feast on whatever remained.

Well, now Mother didn't feel like playing nice any more.

Slowly, surely, she gently urged her children toward what she had determined was her rogue son's stronghold. He needed to be separated from those strange females and taught a lesson in obeying his mother.

After this, she would be able to shape him into a proper member of her family. She would find a way to open the collective minds to her poor lost baby, to teach him how to create more of her brood by changing the horrible creatures who killed his siblings so they could be part of her family as well. He would be a much better son once she had taught him the proper ways again.

The shell that had once been a young woman named Elizabeth Greene, codenamed MOTHER, smiled. Her children would fight, and then they would be safe from ever being hurt again.

**

* * *

****A/N:** Sorry this is like a month late and short, but I have only so much time even in the summer. But here's a plot-heavy chapter to make up for the wait!


End file.
